Volume 47, Number 4 · March 9, 2000
Who's Really Who
By Edmund S. Morgan, Marie Morgan
American National Biography Societies
published under the auspices of the American Council of Learned, by John A. Garraty, by Mark C. Carnes
Oxford University Press, $2,500.00, 24 volumes
Two people named John Adams, one born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1735, the other about twenty miles west of Braintree in Medway in 1812. The first was a leader of the American Revolution, helped write the Declaration of Independence, and succeeded George Washington as president of the United States. The second made a career of capturing and training grizzly bears in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for exhibition around the country in the 1850s. You can read about the first John Adams in the new American National Biography (ANB) and also, at somewhat greater length, in the older twenty-volume Dictionary of American Biography (DAB). You can read about the second John Adams, better known as Grizzly Adams, only in the ANB. That, in short, is the difference between these two reference works. But it is a difference that reaches well beyond the fun of finding so improbable a character as Grizzly Adams while looking for his more famous namesake.
Review, 7059 words
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