The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams PDF Author: Henry Adams
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
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.

The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams PDF Author: Henry Adams
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 562

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Last American Aristocrat

The Last American Aristocrat PDF Author: David S. Brown
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982128259
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
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 and the Making of America

Henry Adams and the Making of America PDF Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618872664
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
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.

The Letters of Henry Adams

The Letters of Henry Adams PDF Author: Henry Adams
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674526860
Category : Historians
Languages : en
Pages : 910

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Book Description


Democracy

Democracy PDF Author: Henry Adams
Publisher: E-Kitap Projesi & Cheapest Books
ISBN: 6155529663
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
THIS BOOK, First published anonymously, March 1880, and soon in various unauthorized editions. It wasn't until the 1925 edition that Adams was listed as author.Henry Adams remarked (ironically as usual), "The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life."it was very popular, as readers tried to guess who the author was and who the characters really were.ON the first of December, Mrs. Lee took the train for Washington, and before five o'clock that evening she was entering her newly hired house on Lafayette Square. She shrugged her shoulders with a mingled expression of contempt and grief at the curious barbarism of the curtains and the wall-papers, and her next two days were occupied with a life-and-death struggle to get the mastery over her surroundings.In this awful contest the interior of the doomed house suffered as though a demon were in it; not a chair, not a mirror, not a carpet, was left untouched, and in the midst of the worst confusion the new mistress sat, calm as the statue of Andrew Jackson in the square under her eyes, and issued her orders with as much decision as that hero had ever shown. Towards the close of the second day, victory crowned her forehead. A new era, a nobler conception of duty and existence, had dawned upon that benighted and heathen residence. The wealth of Syria and Persia was poured out upon the melancholy Wilton carpets; embroidered comets and woven gold from Japan and Teheran depended from and covered over every sad stuff-curtain; a strange medley of sketches, paintings, fans, embroideries, and porcelain was hung, nailed, pinned, or stuck against the wall; finally the domestic altarpiece, the mystical Corot landscape, was hoisted to its place over the parlour fire, and then all was over. The setting sun streamed softly in at the windows, and peace reigned in that redeemed house and in the heart of its mistress."I think it will do now, Sybil," said she, surveying the scene.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres PDF Author: Henry Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Civilization, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description


Henry Adams

Henry Adams PDF Author: Ernest Samuels
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674387355
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
Henry Adams sought, late in life, to thwart prospective biographers by writing his own biography. Published soon after his death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams was rightly greeted as a masterpiece. Not until thirty years later, with the appearance of the first volume of Ernest Samuelsâe(tm)s biography, did it become apparent how much the story had been colored by Adamsâe(tm)s singular philosophy of history and how great was the disparity between the protagonist of the Education and Adams as he actually was. Upon its completion in 1964, Samuelsâe(tm)s life of Henry Adams was hailed as âeoeone of the great biographical achievements of our timeâe ; its laurels included a Pulitzer Prize.Ernest Samuels has now distilled his ample narrative into a single absorbing volume. We see Adams as a lively undergraduate, in contrast to the jaded young man of the Education; as budding writer, newspaper correspondent, eager participant in political maneuverings in Washington and at the American embassy in London; as teacher at Harvard and editor of the North American Review; settled in Washington, as scholar, biographer, historian, novelist; as insatiable traveler; as friend and adviser to statesmen; as elderly cosmopolite spending half of each year abroad; and always as witty chronicler of the social scene and trenchant commentator on the events of his time. We are drawn into the personal drama of Adamsâe(tm)s middle years: his married life with Clover; the halcyon period in Washington in the early 1880s, catastrophically terminated by Cloverâe(tm)s depression and suicide; his growing passion for Elizabeth Cameron; and his flight to the South Seas. Throughout the book we follow the genesis and progress of his writings, from his muckracking journalism in President Grantâe(tm)s Washington, through the social and political criticism of his novels, his biographies, and his great History, to the classic Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the daring theories of the Education, and his last essays.Few biographies have so broad a canvasâe"sixty years of American political, social, and intellectual life, from the preâe"Civil War years to the First World War. And few offer so revealing a portrait of a complex human being and an extraordinary career.

Henry Adams

Henry Adams PDF Author: James P. Young
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"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."--BOOK JACKET.

The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams PDF Author: Henry Adams
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486146588
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning work by distinguished historian recounts search for order in a chaotic world. "A book of unique richness, of unforgettable comment and challenging thought . . ." — The New York Times.

The Life of Albert Gallatin

The Life of Albert Gallatin PDF Author: Henry Adams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 718

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Book Description