Was Alexis de Tocqueville a “journalist” when he wrote his four-volume work, Democracy in America, in the 1800s?

Well, he was not writing for a daily newspaper or other “journal,” but he was certainly doing what journalists do… going somewhere interesting to find out what is happening, observing and interviewing people, including powerful people if they will talk to him. And then attempting to interpret or analyze the events and people in print.

The biographies at standard reference books describe de Tocqueville as a political scientist, historian, and politician. His writing from America is recognized as “a perceptive analysis of the political and social system of the United States in the early 19th century.”

And in the 1960s, the later days of radio drama in America, NBC turned Democracy in America into the radio equivalent of what TV would later call a miniseries. The 14 half hour episodes feature a cast of accomplished actors with appropriate accents — French for de Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont,  of course — with other ethnic and regional voices as the two Frenchmen make their way from the docks of New York to the White House.

The Old Time Radio Researchers group has contributed two copies of the series to the Internet Archive, one a full collection of single episodes that can be streamed or downloaded individually from the archive website, and the other a zip file containing all of those episodes plus other resources.