One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

A “marvelous…compelling” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation. Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these powerful men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era. “Thoroughly researched and gracefully written” (The Wall Street Journal), The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence. Offering a fresh window on nineteenth century US history, as well as a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before, The Last American Aristocrat is a “standout portrait of the man and his era” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Henry Adams has been a neglected figure in recent years. The Education of Henry Adams is widely accepted as a classic of American letters, but his other work is little read except by specialists. His brilliant journalism is out of print, while Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and the novels Democracy and Esther receive little attention. Even the monumental History of the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, considered by some to be the greatest history written by any American, seems noticed only by scholars of that period. James P. Young, author of the highly regarded Reconsidering American Liberalism, seeks to revive interest in the thought of Adams by extracting core ideas from his writings concerning both American political development and the course of world history and then showing their relevance to the contemporary longing for a democratic revival. In this revisionist study, Young denies that Adams was a reactionary critic of democracy and instead contends that he was an idealistic, though often disappointed, advocate of representative government. Young focuses on Adams's belief that capitalist industrial development during the Gilded Age had debased American ideals and then turns to a careful study of Adams's famous contrast of the unity of medieval society with the fragmentation of modern technological society. Though fully aware of Adams's concerns about technology, Young rejects the idea that Adams was bitterly opposed to twentieth century developments in that field. He shows that though a liberal democrat with inclinations toward reform, Adams is much too sophisticated to be captured by any simple label.

Bestselling author Wills showcases Henry Adams little-known but seminal studyof the early United States, and draws from it fresh insights on the paradoxesthat roil America to this day.

Originally published anonymously, it was later revealed that this classic work of political fiction was penned by Henry Brooks Adams, the renowned essayist and journalist best known for the autobiography The Education of Henry Adams. Though fictionalized, Democracy: An American Novel offers a gripping account of the vagaries and vicissitudes of political power that still rings true more than a century after it was first published.

Long identified with African-American style and culture, Harlem is also a pillar of New York's social and architectural history. In this beautifully illustrated study, historian Michael Henry Adams presents an evocative portrait of the various and divergent Harlems of yesteryear, from the Native American settlements discovered by the Dutch in the seventeenth century to the vibrant community of present-day preservationists. In addition to the legacy of residential architecture—Dutch farmhouses, Native American longhouses, mansions and country villas, thoughtfully planned row houses, and handsome apartment buildings, the author examines schools, industrial facilities, stores, churches, and more. Harlem's spectrum of designers ranges from the well known—McKim, Mead & White, responsible for part of Strivers' Row; George B. Post & Sons, architects of the monumental Shepard Hall at the City College of the City University of New York—to practitioners who, though today mostly forgotten, designed much of the urban fabric of Harlem and New York City. All have contributed to an extraordinarily rich streetscape that today preserves the best of Harlem's past.

"This book examines the writings and life of Henry Adams during his time in Washington, D.C."--

This book, first published in 1933, examines the life and achievements of Henry Adams, the American historian and political journalist. It looks at his youth and early development of his ideas, and goes on to look at his time as a diplomat, historian and journalist – and his impact upon American political and intellectual life.

The naturalist tradition in American fiction was a product of the tremendous changes wrought in late nineteenth-century America by the development of science and technology and by the intellectual upheavals associated with the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This book is an account of naturalism, perhaps the strongest and most influential intellectual tradition or, as Harold Kaplan would argue, mythology to affect modern American literature and culture.Kaplan approaches the naturalist writers through a study of Henry Adams. He sees in Adams the paradigmatic intelligence of his time a prophetic mind, though not a seminal one and a man absorbed with the twin notions of power and order. Adams's major work illustrates the joining of a literary imagination and moral temperament with an almost obsessive response to the science, economic life, and politics of his world. Adams's work exemplifies what Kaplan calls the myth of metapolitics a view of human struggle and fate profoundly dominated by naturalist concepts of power.Kaplan then turns to the fascination that power in its various manifestations material, moral, social, political held for writers such as Dreiser, Norris, Crane, and others. Their dramatic plots, characters, and allegorical images are examined in detail. In wider reference, this book should concern those who are interested in problems of modern ethics and politics in the effort to harmonize concepts of value with images of power and natural order.