Adams has the disconcerting habit of speaking of himself in the third person like Jimmy from Seinfeld. I found the talking in third person a little odd. I do not want to overstate the prophetic nature of Adams or of his book and recreate him as a Yankee Nostradamus, but that concept does identify a crucial element in the thinking of this man who so far as he resided in any academic camp was at one point the dean of American historians. In his Education he produced one of the best autobiographies ever written, chronicling the rapid change of the last half of the nineteenth century while sharing personal experiences with his father, at Harvard, Washington and elsewhere. He is still working toward his dynamic theory, the beginning of which must be recognition of the abyss of ignorance. I am being a bit unfair. Adams later will mention development of metals, more sophisticated use of tools, and the spread of writing as examples of this period.
There are a just a few books Meditations, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Brothers Karamazov that I feel every person on the planet should read. What is missing from this book is 20 years, and an important 20 years it was for Adams, as it is the period of his marriage to Marian Hooper, whom was commonly called Clover. His self-report is that he never had any power, his actions had no effect and he never really understood anything. There's a sense of the doom of modernity that wreaths his thoughts like a fog-- in line with T. Bravo for his section on the power of women and the detrimental effect of Westernized de-sexing of women.
The writing of Henry Adams can take some getting used to. And with his kinda cash, he'd be footing the bill. His self-report is that he never had any power, his actions had no effect and he never really understood anything. In this work he explored the dilemma of governing an egalitarian society in a political world in which the predominant tendency was to power. Perhaps that is why Henry Adams still sounds so current. The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for the study of relation. Such a scene probably could never happen again, but imagine the impact on the other students to have a President of the United States bring a classmate to school.
Such a system, or want of system, might last centuries, if tempered by an occasional revolution or civil war; but as a machine, it was, or soon would be, the poorest in the world—the clumsiest—the most inefficient. It's very strange to read historiography which excludes them so painstakingly. Abstract: The Death Penalty Information Center, based in Washington, D. These characteristics have led some critics to view him as an misfit. Time has not been kind to Adams' style.
The autobiography in the third-person, the knowingness, the sarcasm and self-deprecation were all refreshing to begin with but their charm has tired somewhat, and it's just too detailed and private a history for me to want another 300 pages of it. After that , every page, every paragraph had to be thought about. Chapter after chapter details what he didn't learn in Boston, in London, in Germany. This edition contained a preface penned by Adams but signed by Henry Cabot Lodge in 1918. I especially enjoyed his accounts of British politics during the American Civil War, which he spent in London serving as private secretary to his father, Charles Frances Adams, the Minister to Great Britain. Adams occasionally demonstrates remarkable prescience regarding political developments in the coming century, here accurately predicting the importance of Germany's relationship with France and England. His closest friends were John Hay, who served presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, senator from Massachusetts, cousin of American philosopher Charles Pierce.
Their letters remain a rich source of information on everything from gossip to the most current trends of thought. These articles were published in Chapters of Erie and Other Essays 1871. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime. Other significant subjects that Adams covers include his personal views on several Presidents, including some very strong feelings about Grant, as well as some lack of interest many that came after, and concern over the youth of Roosevelt. Taken together they may be read as Adams' spiritual autobiography — two monumental volumes in which he attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy, art, and literature in order to attempt to understand the individual's place in history and society.
The import of the text begins with its author, the weight of its influence with its first audience; its continued appreciation has as much to do with the first two factors as the fact that it was brilliantly constructed by a man of letters at the height of his powers. With the outbreak of the U. The third phase ran to about 1800. John Orr In 1907, as Henry Adams began passing around copies of The Education of Henry Adams to a select group of friends and associates, the United States was in the early stages of its imperium. This was self published and not publicly available until after the authors death. For those who wonder why, this book is exactly why the world needed a Hemingway.
Adams was stunned when, in 1885, his wife of 13 years, , committed suicide. So an at times fascinating if ultimately problematic read. What kind of crazy shit are you gonna do next? I especially enjoyed his accounts of British politics during the American Civil War, which he spent in London serving as private secretary to his father, Charles Frances Adams, the Minister to Great Britain. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin. Adams treated his personal education as a fluid, ever-changing, and dynamic force that was always yearning for renewal.
This group of insurgents, repelled by partisanship and the scandals of the Grant administration, bolted the Republican Party in 1872 and nominated the Democrat for president. يقودنا هنري في جولة تاريخية هامة وتأتي صعوبتها من كونها جولة فلسفية وفكرية معمّقة لا تفارقها نكهة السياسة، وهذا أمر طبيعي إذ أنّ هنري ينحدر من عائلة سياسية بارزة وصل منها رئيسان إلى الحكم، ولذلك فإنّ هذه الجولة ليست بالممتعة أغلب الأحيان لصعوبتها وكثرة شخصياتها، فه هذا الكتاب ليس بالكتاب السهل، وهو لا يروي سيرة ذاتية عادية ولا يتحدث عن التعليم الذي تلقاه هنري آدامز فحسب، إنما هو موجز حيّ لأمريكا الولايات المتحدة القرن التاسع عشر، ولهذا السبب يُعتبر الكتاب من أغرب وأصعب وحتّى أهم السير الذاتية. I didn't feel that so much this time. Although a Bostonian, he inherited an eccentric outsider-dom from his famous forebears, and remained to the end of his life apart from the business community of that city. Adams was a man of great gifts and cultivation, but with a unique, eccentric, mugwumpishly conservative temperament that makes his collision and confrontation with the early modernist era he lived through especially instructive and relevant to our own time.