Henry Brooks Adams

Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), American historian, philosopher of history, and cultural critic, who wrote one of the most outstanding American autobiographies.

A son of the elder Charles Francis Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, Adams was born in Boston, on February 16, 1838, and educated at Harvard University. After his graduation (1858) from Harvard, Adams travelled for two years in Germany and Italy. From 1860 to 1868 he was private secretary to his father. He then decided to become a teacher and from 1869 to 1876 was Assistant Professor of History at Harvard, where he introduced the seminar system of instruction. During part of that period he also edited the periodical The North American Review. After 1885 he devoted himself almost entirely to historical research and writing. Adams travelled extensively in Europe, spending considerable time in France. He died in Washington, D.C., on March 27, 1918.

Adams's most impressive achievement as a historian is his History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (9 vol., 1889-1891), in which he contended that the decisions and policies of the period from 1801 to 1817 shaped the main course of subsequent American political development. Among his other writings are two biographies, The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879) and John Randolph (1882). He wrote two novels, Democracy (1880), a political satire, and Esther (1884), a story about New York society.

His Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919) includes three essays on his philosophy of history. In this work Adams introduced his dynamic theory of history. Derived from the second law of thermodynamics, the theory maintains that mechanical energy is in a constant state of dissipation. Human history is similarly devoid of purpose and consists merely of a succession of energy phases. Another major contribution to the philosophy of history is found in the privately printed Mont-St-Michel and Chartres (1904), a sensitive and penetrating discussion of medieval culture. In his most widely read book, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; posthumous Pulitzer Prize, 1919), he discussed the fundamental character of the history of Western civilization and gave a critical examination of the age in which he lived. The book is an autobiography, written in the third person with detached scepticism and delicate irony, in which he presents himself as being representative of the American mind at a particular historical moment.

Adams's works reveal a profound concern with the destiny of the modern world. His prose style is forceful, as is his treatment of ideas. Although he thought of his privately published books as unsatisfactory, later critics place them among the important works of the 20th century.