The Jeffersonian Transformation

Henry Adams (1838–1918), a lineal descendant of presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, grew up in Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College, and served during the Civil War as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, who was the US ambassador to Great Britain at the time. Returning to Washington from England 1868, Adams was deeply dismayed by the politics of the Reconstruction Era and renounced any political ambitions of his own, dedicating himself instead to a career of writing and teaching. From 1870 to 1877, Adams lectured on history at Harvard while editing The North American Review. He then moved back to Washington, his primary residence for the rest of his life. In 1880 Adams published Democracy, an anonymous novel about American politics, and in 1884 Esther, a New York story which appeared under the pseudonym of Frances Snow Compton. Biographies of Albert Gallatin (1879) and John Randolph (1889) reflected a profound knowledge of the early history of the American Republic that culminated in the nine volumes of the History of the United States of America Under the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, which came out between 1889 and 1891. Adams's marriage to Marian Hooper in 1872 ended with her suicide in 1888, an event which left him distraught. In later years Adams advocated a deterministic theory of history, which he sought to establish as a hard science on the model of physics. This view finds remarkable expression in the two eccentric masterpieces of Adams's old age, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres and the autobiographical Education of Henry Adams, privately printed in 1907 and only released to the public following Adams's death in 1918. »

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His most recent book, What Jesus Meant, was published in 2006. »

The Jeffersonian Transformation

Passages from the "History"

By Henry Adams
Introduction by Garry Wills

A New York Review Books Original

The ideal introduction and companion to Adams's "massive and magisterial" history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, presenting an indelible picture of America's startling rise to world power.

Henry Adams's nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison is the first great history of America as well as the first great American work of history, a work that rivals Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in its eloquence and sweep. But where Gibbon told of imperial collapse, Adams recorded the rise of a new, unanticipated power, America, which, he shows, beat every odd to expand in a mere sixteen years—1800 to 1817—from a backward provincial outpost to international eminence. What made this transformation all the more remarkable was that it occurred under the watch of two presidents who were frankly skeptical about its benefits, and yet whose policies served to promote it. Thus America not only found its footing in the world, but took on a divided identity—at once isolationist and interventionist—that it continues to display to this day.

Famed historian and political commentator Garry Wills's recent, widely reviewed, and well-received Henry Adams and the Making of America introduced readers to the splendors of Adams's history and the rigors of its analysis. This ample new selection from Adams's History is the first to bring together its powerful opening and concluding sections. Together with Wills's thoughtful introduction, it offers readers a chance to experience the magnum opus of one of America's outstanding writers and thinkers.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Read an excerpt (PDF)

Reviews

New York Review Books Classics has published an excellent abridgment of Henry Adams' nine-volume History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison as The Jeffersonian Transformation... The word "magisterial" is tossed around whenever anybody writes a ponderous tome with any claim to definitive status. But Adams' book truly deserves the term, both for his grasp of the overall, and his prose, which has a gorgeous rolling cadence.
— Austin American-Statesman

In his History of the United States of America... Adams drew on this mix of disillusioned lucidity and cautious hopefulness to show just how America became America. Although often invoked, the History, is less often read. That is a great pity. Adams's work is a masterpiece, the closest thing to an American epic we possess...readers daunted by its bulk may prefer to begin with The Jeffersonian Transformation: Passages from the History, edited and introduced by Garry Wills.
— The New York Sun

Wills helps to renew and extend the pertinence of Adams's History from his time to our own.
— Andrew Delbanco, The New Republic

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.21 (25% off)

Sep 19, 2006
240 pages
ISBN: 1590172159
9781590172155
NYRB Classics
History

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