Democratic Vistas is a book by the American author Walt Whitman, published in 1871. It is considered an early classic work of comparative politics and letters. Whitman, who was then working as a federal clerk, does much to expound on the influence of the Louisiana Purchase and expansion on the American spirit, character, and body politic. He also criticizes Thomas Carlyle's Shooting Niagara: and after? and other literary works and comments on the Industrial Revolution and the predecessors of Modernism, which chose restraint and rationality above emotion and feelings.