The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Fiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages :

The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography that records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838–1918), in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th-century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense. Commercial publication of the book had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. The Modern Library placed it first in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.


The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher: Standard Ebooks
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Biography & Autobiography
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 563

One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.


The Education of Henry Adams Annotated

The Education of Henry Adams Annotated

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 608

The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography that records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838-1918), in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th-century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense. Commercial publication of the book had to await its author's 1918 death, whereupon it won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. The Modern Library placed it first in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.The Education is more a record of Adams's introspection and his observations than of his deeds. It is an extended meditation on the social, technological, political, and intellectual changes that occurred over Adams's lifetime. Adams concluded that his traditional education failed to help him come to terms with these rapid changes, hence, his need for self-education. The organizing thread of the book is how the "proper" schooling and other aspects of his youth was time wasted, thus, his search for self-education through experiences, friendships, and reading.


The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher: CreateSpace
  • ISBN: 9781500204297
  • Category : Biography & Autobiography
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 262

'The Education of Henry Adams, ' his autobiography whichwon a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1919


The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Historians
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 546


The Education of Henry Adams Annotated And Illustrated Book With Teacher Edition

The Education of Henry Adams Annotated And Illustrated Book With Teacher Edition

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 464

"Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he," the narrator says of the birth of Henry Brooks Adams in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 16, 1838. Through a series of impressions, he introduces the reader to Henry's boyhood world. Winters in Boston are filled with restraint, rules, confinement, school, and a sense of order that is thrillingly interrupted by wild snowball fights. Summers at his paternal grandparents' home in nearby Quincy bring freedom, delight, hope, and a close relationship with Grandfather John Quincy Adams, formerly the sixth President of the United States. Henry is a child of privilege; that, as much as anything, shapes the outer direction of his life. But his world is rapidly changing, a theme that will affect Henry's education throughout the book. Social change comes first. A trip to Maryland, Virginia and Washington D. C., with his father in 1850, introduces Henry to life in the near South, its appealing informality contrasting with the horrors of slavery, which the Adams family is devoted to eradicating even though it will mean Civil War. The style of the book affects the reader's understanding. The narrator is Henry in his late sixties; he speaks in the third person, treating the younger Henry objectively except for occasional insights into the boy's attitudes. The reader rarely sees Henry's emotions. Adams speaks of the key figure as a manikin and his education as the various costumes draped across it. The reader soon learns that Adams is using the term "education" in an unusual, broad sense. He has little use for formal schooling, including Harvard College where Henry, as told in the book, is an average student but a good writer and speaker, graduating in 1858 as the Class Orator. During a two-year "Grand Tour" of Europe, Henry makes a lame effort at studying law but finds that his German is inadequate and ends up devoting a term to learning the language in a Berlin prep school. He returns to work as a private secretary to his father, a Congressman, in Washington during the winter of 1860-1861. Having published some travel letters in the Boston Daily Courier while in Europe, Henry becomes the part-time Washington correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser during the winter of political turmoil leading up to the secession of many of the slave states.


The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 392

A scion of the famous Adams family of American statesmen, historian Henry Adams crafted this well-known autobiographical work, which reflects his constant search for order in a world of chaos. He cast himself as a modern everyman, seeking coherence in a fragmented universe and concluding that his education was inadequate for the demands of modern society.


The Education of Henry Adams (Illustrated)

The Education of Henry Adams (Illustrated)

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 607

The Education of Henry Adams is not an autobiography as much as it is the biography of an education. The narrator, in his late sixties, refers to his younger self in the third person. In his "Preface," he introduces the metaphor of a manikin, which represents Henry Adams. The various garments draped across the manikin represent his education. The reader will find wit but little passion and less private information in the book. In fact, the narrator will simply skip twenty years (1872-1892) during which Adams was married and his wife committed suicide. In this opening chapter, the reader is introduced to the initial educational impressions of a boy who seems exceptional only by birth. "Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he," Adams writes. Yet the reader is almost immediately told that the world which Adams enters is rapidly changing. It is a world of contrasts. Contrast will prove to be a favorite device of the narrator throughout the book. Here, he sets Boston against Quincy in terms that a child understands. Boston is winter, unity, restraint, rules, confinement, and discipline. Quincy is summer, liberty, diversity, sensual delight, hope, and a touch of outlawry. Quincy is the home of his beloved paternal grandfather, John Quincy, who quietly but forcefully takes six-year-old Henry's hand one morning and marches him to a summer school session that the boy resists, a lesson in responsibility even in Quincy. Vigor contrasts with illness. Shortly before his fourth birthday, Henry develops scarlet fever and nearly dies. He blames it for his diminished physical stature (barely five feet three inches tall as an adult) and delicate nerves. Shortly after Henry's tenth birthday, his grandfather John Quincy suffers a stroke. His death effectively ends the first chapter of the boy's education. Henry has learned the joy of sights, sounds, and summer play, along with the grim realities of illness and impending death. The reader begins to suspect that he will not find, here, a traditional definition of "education." Adams lets on that it has little to do with schooling. He describes a schoolmaster as "a man employed to tell lies to little boys," foreshadowing his lifelong criticism of formal education, including that offered by a college as prestigious as Harvard.


The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

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  • Author: Henry Adams
  • Publisher: Norman Berg
  • ISBN: 9780910220743
  • Category : Historians, American
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 529

'I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams, ' said Gore Vidal. 'He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors.' His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors--great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams--Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War. Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author's death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams is a brilliant, idiosyncratic blend of autobiography and history that charts the great transformation in American life during the so-called Gilded Age. With an introduction by renowned historian Edmund Morris.


The Last American Aristocrat

The Last American Aristocrat

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  • Author: David S. Brown
  • Publisher: Simon and Schuster
  • ISBN: 1982128240
  • Category : Biography & Autobiography
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 464

A “marvelous…compelling” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation. Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these powerful men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era. “Thoroughly researched and gracefully written” (The Wall Street Journal), The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence. Offering a fresh window on nineteenth century US history, as well as a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before, The Last American Aristocrat is a “standout portrait of the man and his era” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).