Henry Adams

I have found another historian to add to the pantheon of Most Useful and Most Interesting.




How could I have missed Henry Adams for all this time? His great-grandfather and grandfather both presidents? His father one of the negotiators in Britain to ensure it didn't recognize the CSA. Charles Sumner constantly at the house, and one of those men the boy Adams admired and liked so much? A man who wrote a history in nine volumes of the U.S. during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison? Who wrote a long historical essay on Napoleon and San Domingue? Who lived through the Civil War into the 20th century, and lived inside D.C. for decades? Wrote novels?

That while reading him I hear the voice of Gore Vidal coming through loud and clear only helps matters. Vidal too experienced so much of the history he lived through personally knowing those in the corridors of power. One wonders even, if that narrator's voice in his historical series, Chronicles of Empire, in any way was influenced by that of Henry Adams.

Adams conducted his research from archives and primary documents in Britain and Europe too, as well as here in the U.S. Which allows him to avoid that triumphalist exceptionalism that so many of his contemporaries communicated. He thought seeing our actions through the eyes of other nations to be a very useful thing that politicians should take more into account. Imagine how acceptable that attitude was, which might explain how he got dropped from the American history curriculum.

He was never presented to us as an historian in university. He was taught, if at all, as a minor belles lettres sort, quaint and of less relevance the further his era receded into the past -- The Education of Henry Adams. I found this book unreadable. Now I know why -- I didn't know anything!  All the figures he refers to, even in the first five pages, I had no idea at all who they were. This was in the American Literature department. He was part of Lit and Lit Crit, but not history curricula.