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Henry Adams and the Making of America
Garry Wills
One of our greatest historians offers a surprising new view of the greatest historian of the nineteenth century, Henry Adams.
Houghton Mifflin
September 2005
Featuring: Henry Adams
448 pages
ISBN: 0618134301
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Wills showcases Henry Adams's little-known but seminal
study of the early United States and elicits from it fresh
insights on the paradoxes that roil America to this day.
Adams drew on his own southern fixation, his extensive
foreign travel, his political service in Lincoln's White
House, and much more to invent the study of history as we
know it. His nine-volume chronicle of America from 1800 to
1816 established new standards for employing archival
sources, firsthand reportage, eyewitness accounts, and
other techniques that have become the essence of modern
history.
Adams's innovations went beyond the technical; he posited
an essentially ironic view of the legacy of Jefferson and
Madison. As is well known, they strove to shield the young
country from "foreign entanglements," a standing army, a
central bank, and a federal bureaucracy, among other
hallmarks of "big government." Yet by the end of their
tenures they had permanently entrenched all of these things
in American society. This is the "American paradox" that
defines us today: the idealized desire for isolation and
political simplicity battling against the inexorable growth
and intermingling of political, economic, and military
forces. As Wills compellingly shows, the ironies spawned
two centuries ago still inhabit our foreign policy and the
widening schisms over economic and social policy.
Ambitious in scope, nuanced in detail and argument, Henry
Adams and the Making of America throws brilliant light on
how history is made -- in both senses of the term.
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