writes, "is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken'd, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. it is a great word, whose history, i suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted." 1 this claim appears in Whitman's 1871 essay Democratic Vistas, and as the metaphor of the title makes clear, Whitman uses his text to look ahead, to imagine an idea of democracy to come. Whitman signals to us that such work is historical in nature: theorizing possible futures necessitates an understanding of our past. as manning marable writes, "[h]istorical amnesia blocks the construction of potentially successful social movements.. .. thus, for the oppressed, the act of reconstructing history is inextricably linked to the political practices, or praxis, of transforming the present and future." 2 few texts are more important than Democratic Vistas in debates about literary history's value for prefiguring possible democratic futures, but how are we to use our literary history for contemporary politics? roberto mangabeira Unger and cornel West call Democratic Vistas "the secular bible of democracy" 3 and stephen John mack has recently called the text Whitman's "most profound and sustained meditation on democratic life." 4 Like Unger, West, and mack, i believe that Democratic Vistas is still capable of helping us address our contemporary political problems. Whitman wrote his text, in part, as a rebuttal to thomas carlyle's essay "shooting niagara: and after?" 5 Whitman directly responds to carlyle's criticism of democracy, naming him at several moments in the text, and, in doing so, Whitman positions carlyle as the counterpoint to his own position. carlyle's essay is shockingly bigoted, and this fact may have caused scholars to reject his ideas largely without scrutiny. carlyle's ideas are offensive, but they are not locked safely in the past. Quite the contrary, the ideas that animated both carlyle and Whitman still inform contemporary debates about democracy. much of the scholarship on Democratic Vistas has given the conversation between carlyle and Whitman only a brief treatment and has, there