Other editions of book The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838-1918), in early old age, 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. It was the winner of a 1919 Pulitzer Prize.The Education is an important work of American literary nonfiction. It provides a penetrating glimpse into the intellectual and political life of the late 19th century.Homeschoolers value The Education because it makes a strong case against the regimented Prussian-style schooling used by American and European school systems. He preferred a self-directed approach of a kind that had predominated before 1850 and that relied on reading, discussion, reflection, and experience.

The Education of Henry Adams records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838-1918), in early old age, 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. It was the winner of a 1919 Pulitzer Prize.The Education is an important work of American literary nonfiction. It provides a penetrating glimpse into the intellectual and political life of the late 19th century.Homeschoolers value The Education because it makes a strong case against the regimented Prussian-style schooling used by American and European school systems. He preferred a self-directed approach of a kind that had predominated before 1850 and that relied on reading, discussion, reflection, and experience.

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

Under the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, who does not enter the field of racing, finds advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed through life, with the safeguards of an old, established traffic. Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one needs them at all, one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years earlier, such safeguards as his would have secured any young man's success; and although in 1838 their value was not very great compared with what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so colonial,--so troglodytic--as the First Church, the Boston State House, Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long after he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth? Had he been consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding such cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be one of which neither he nor any one else back to the beginning of time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes? He was not consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken into the confidence of his parents, he would certainly have told them to change nothing as far as concerned him. He would have been astounded by his own luck. Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he. Whether life was an honest game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could not refuse to play his excellent hand. He could never make the usual plea of irresponsibility. He accepted the situation as though he had been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would do it again, the more readily for knowing the exact values. To his life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting party and partner from the moment he was born to the moment he died. Only with that understanding--as a consciously assenting member in full partnership with the society of his age--had his education an interest to himself or to others.- Taken from "The Education of Henry Adams" written by Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams 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. The Modern Library placed it first in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century.The Education is much more a record of Adams's introspection 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. Two aspects set The Education apart from the common run of autobiographies. First, it is narrated in the third person; second, it is frequently sarcastic and humorously self-critical.

THIS volume, written in 1905 as a sequel to the same author's "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres," was privately printed, to the number of one hundred copies, in 1906, and sent to the persons interested, for their assent, correction, or suggestion. The idea of the two books was thus explained at the end of Chapter XXIX: —"Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit — the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally knew as 'Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity.' From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: 'The Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity.' With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should know better."

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 AdamsHenry Adams, historian and member of the Adams political family (1838-1918)This ebook presents «The Education of Henry Adams», from Henry Adams. A dynamic table of contents enables to jump directly to the chapter selected.Table of Contents-01- About this book-02- PREFACES-03- QUINCY 1838-1848-04- BOSTON 1848-1854-05- WASHINGTON 1850-1854-06- HARVARD COLLEGE 1854-1858-07- BERLIN 1858-1859-08- ROME 1859-1860-09- TREASON 1860-1861-10- DIPLOMACY 1861-11- FOES OR FRIENDS 1862-12- POLITICAL MORALITY 1862-13- THE BATTLE OF THE RAMS 1863-14- ECCENTRICITY 1863-15- THE PERFECTION OF HUMAN SOCIETY 1864-16- DILETTANTISM 1865-1866-17- DARWINISM 1867-1868-18- THE PRESS 1868-19- PRESIDENT GRANT 1869-20- FREE FIGHT 1869-1870-21- CHAOS 1870-22- FAILURE 1871-23- TWENTY YEARS AFTER 1892-24- CHICAGO 1893-25- SILENCE 1894-1898-26- INDIAN SUMMER 1898-1899-27- THE DYNAMO AND THE VIRGIN 1900-28- TWILIGHT 1901-29- TEUFELSDRÖCKH 1901-30- THE HEIGHT OF KNOWLEDGE 1902-31- THE ABYSS OF IGNORANCE 1902-32- VIS INERTIAE 1903-33- THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 1903-34- VIS NOVA 1903-1904-35- A DYNAMIC THEORY OF HISTORY 1904-36- A LAW OF ACCELERATION 1904-37- NUNC AGE 1905

This book is an illustrated version of the original The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams. “Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, who does not enter the field of racing, finds advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed through life, with the safeguards of an old, established traffic. Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one needs them at all, one is apt to need them badly.”

The Education of Henry Adams is among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. Henry Adams was the grandson of a President and the great-grandson of another one. He was also the son of the American Ambassador to England, and his secretery. As such he rubbed elbows, literally, with Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and with many of the great figures of his time. This audiobook contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism...." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams' book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. This Pulitzer Prize-winner is considered by many to be one of the three greatest autoboigraphies ever written (the other two being Benjaman Franklin's and Jean-Jacques Rosseau's). Published 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 19th and early 20th centuries.