Adams, Henry [Brooks] (1838–1918), grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of Charles Francis Adams, claims in his autobiography that his conventional education was defective, despite the best Boston and Quincy background, Harvard, German postgraduate training, and his position as secretary during his father's ministry to England at the time of the Civil War. His first writing, an article on Captain John Smith published in 1867, was followed by other contributions to periodicals, including a review of Lyell's
Principles of Geology (1868), clearly showing his belief in the importance of the evolutionary theory in human history and Adams's own divorce from the absolute standards of his ancestors. Returning from England to Washington, D.C. (1868), he continued to write carefully considered articles, and, completely out of sympathy with Reconstruction politics, abandoned former ideas of a political career to teach history at Harvard (1870–77), for most of this period also editing
The North American Review. He next went to Washington to write history and to seek the companionship of such men as Secretary of State Evarts, John Hay, and Clarence King, for he said ironically, “So far as [I] had a function in life, it was as stable‐companion to statesmen.” There he wrote
Democracy (1880), an anonymous novel on Washington politics, and
Esther (1884), a pseudonymous novel of New York society. In 1872 he married Marian Hooper, whose suicide in 1885 tragically affected his life. Although he never mentions her in his writings, she probably served as a model for the heroine in
Esther. Adams commissioned his friend Saint‐Gaudens to design for her grave in Washington a symbolic statue, which he called “The Peace of God.” When he could no longer endure life at Washington, he made a long trip through the Orient, from which he returned to complete his
History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (9 vols., 1889–91), portraying politics and diplomacy in the early republic. He traveled widely during the following years, and among the literary results was the
Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti (1893, revised 1901). He “drifted back to Washington with a new sense of history” after a summer in Normandy (1895) and a visit to the Paris Exposition (1900), where he saw the huge dynamo that in his autobiography he was to take as a symbol of mechanistic power and energy in the multiplicity of the 20th century as contrasted to the force of the Virgin, “the ideal of human perfection,” representing the unity of the 13th century, which he treated in
Mont‐Saint‐Michel and Chartres (1904). This scholarly descriptive work, interpretively studying a unified world, was Adams's first attempt to measure the life and thought of an era in terms of Force. In 1910 he published
A Letter to American Teachers of History, reprinted in
The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919) by his brother
Brooks Adams. This work sets forth Henry Adams's dynamic theory of history. The second law of thermodynamics supposes a universal tendency to dissipate mechanical energy and thus vitiates the idea of human history as evolving toward a state of perfection. On the contrary, according to Adams, human thought is a substance passing from one phase to another through critical points determined by attraction, acceleration, and volume (equivalent to pressure, temperature, and volume in mechanical physics), and he points out that history must be studied in the light of these principles. The complementary work to
Mont‐Saint‐Michel is a study of 20th‐century multiplicity,
The Education of Henry Adams (1907). The skepticism and cynicism in the account of his self‐termed failures pass beyond autobiography to a study of the garment of education draped on the “manikin” Henry Adams, a figure used to measure motion, proportion, and human conditions. In later chapters the use of his dynamic theory of history is made explicit. Other books include
Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871), written with his brother Charles Francis Adams, Jr.;
The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879);
John Randolph (1882); and
The Life of George Cabot Lodge (1911). His letters have been printed in various collections, and those of his wife were published in 1936.