Henry Adams & the need to know / edited by William Merrill Decker & Earl N. Harbert.

Format:

• Book

Contributor:

• Decker, William Merrill.
• Harbert, Earl N., 1934-
• Sabin W. Colton, Jr., Memorial Fund.

Series:

• Massachusetts Historical Society studies in American history and culture ; no. 8.
• Massachusetts Historical Society studies in American history and culture ; no. 8

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Adams, Henry, 1838-1918.
• Adams, Henry, 1838-1918--Criticism and interpretation.
• Historians--United States--Biography.
• Historians.
• Criticism and interpretation.
• United States.
• United States--Historiography.
• Historiography.
• Historiography--United States.
• United States--Intellectual life.
• Intellectual life.
• United States--Politics and government.
• Politics and government.

Genre:

• Biographies.

Physical Description:

xv, 383 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Other Title:

Henry Adams and the need to know

Place of Publication:

Boston : Massachusetts Historical Society ; Charlotteville : Distributed by the University of Virginia Press, 2005.

Summary:

• The Great-Grandson of John and Abigail Adams, Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) did not follow his forefathers in a presidential or congressional line of succession. He may however be said to represent a culminating phase of his family's robust intellectual tradition. Historian, novelist, biographer, memoirist, and travel writer, informed commentator on issues pertaining to ethics, economics, gender, geology, and post-Newtonian physics, Adams may be the nearest resemblance to a Renaissance man ever to appear in the United States, and the insights generated by his diverse inquiries engage readers to this day.
• To many he speaks with unprecedented urgency. For Henry Adams at the turn of the twentieth century, as for his successors in the twenty-first, the relation of mind to a world remade by technology and geopolitical conflict largely determines the destiny of civil life. Henry Adams and the Need to Know presents fourteen essays that articulate Adams's ongoing interest to both scholarly and general readerships, stressing his eclecticism and his need to clarify the role of critical intelligence in public life.
• Adams's work appeals to a wide spectrum of historical and literary inquiry and claims a place in multiple scholarly contexts. The topics covered in this volume range from New England politics to hegemonic foreign policies, from the aesthetics of portraiture to representations of the exotic place, from the ambiguities of gender to the ambitions of the human mind. Here, leading scholars explore often overlooked details of Adams's relationships with people and ideas. They reopen settled topics and reframe truisms. Each essay affirms, in one way or another, that to study Adams is to discover his continuing and astonishing relevance.

Contents:

• Henry Adams & the American System / Paul A. Bove 1
• Henry Adams's Debt to John Adams / Richard A. Samuelson 18
• Henry Adams & Henry Cabot Lodge- Teacher & Student: A Complicated Interaction / Ormond Seavey 45
• Investigating the "Great American Mystery": Theory & Style in Henry Adams's Political Reform Moment / Leslie Butler 80
• "No traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end": Henry Adams, Charles Lyell, & the Politics of Uniformity / Crosbie Smith, Ian Higginson 104
• Massachusetts to Virginia: Knowing Henry Adams's John Randolph / Richard G. Androne 138
• Portraits & Privacy: Henry Adams & John Singer Sargent / Barry Maine 177
• Mr. Secrets: Henry Adams & the Breakdown of the Exemplary Tradition in American Autobiography / Joanne Jacobson 206
• Henry Adams: Travel as Episteme / Pierre Lagayette 222
• Henry Adams's Unwritten American Travels / Charles Vandersee 236
• "I measured her as they did with pigs": Henry Adams as Other / John C. Orr 273
• From True Woman to New Woman to Virgin / Cindy Weinstein 300
• A Martyr to the Disease of Omniscience / William Merrill Decker 315
• Henry Adams, U.S. Grant, & Evolution: Practicing History in the Age of Darwin / J. C. Levenson 345.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Sabin W. Colton, Jr., Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

0934909873

OCLC:

57594039

Online:

The Sabin W. Colton, Jr., Memorial Fund Home Page