The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy, and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill.

During his lifetime, he was best known for The History of the United States of America 1801–1817, a nine-volume work, praised for its literary style, command of the documentary evidence, and deep (family) knowledge of the period and its major figures.

His posthumously published memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be named by the Modern Library as the best English-language nonfiction book of the 20th century.

In his 50s, he was initiated into the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity as an honorary member at the 1893 Columbian Exposition by Harris J. Ryan, a judge for the exhibit on electrical engineering.

He worked to introduce the young Henry James to English society, with the help of his closest and lifelong friend Charles Milnes Gaskell and his wife Lady Catherine (nee Wallop).

In the 1880s, Adams wrote two novels, starting with Democracy, which was published anonymously in 1880 and immediately became popular in literary circles in England and Europe as well as in America.

During his tenure it published a number of articles exposing corrupt malpractices in finance, corporations and government, anticipating the work of the "muckrakers" by a generation.

This experience marked the public commencement of Henry Adams' critical observation of, and radical disenchantment with, the operations and ascendancy of corporations and centralized finance in the economic, social and political life of America.

The suggestion that these great corporate organisms, which now perform all the vital functions of our social life, should behave themselves decently, gives away our contention that they have no right to exist.

His important poems "Buddha and Brahma" and "Prayers to the Virgin and the Dynamo" are included (respectively) in the Library of America's Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Anthologies, and a half dozen sonnets, a Troubadour translation, and one lyric are scattered through the letters.

In 1904, Adams privately published a copy of his "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres", a pastiche of history, travel, and poetry that celebrated the unity of medieval society, especially as represented in the great cathedrals of France.

"Henry Adams," wrote Siegel, "grounded the intellectual's alienation from American life in the resentment that superior men feel when they are insufficiently appreciated in America's common-man culture.

Her brother describes her death from tetanus following a carriage accident in Bagni di Lucca, Italy in his Chaos Chapter of The Education of Henry Adams.

John Quincy Adams II (1833–1894) was a graduate of Harvard (1853), practiced law, and was a Democratic member for several terms of the Massachusetts general court.

His books include The Gold Standard (1894), The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), America's Economic Supremacy (1900), The New Empire (1902), The Theory of Social Revolutions (1914), and The Emancipation of Massachusetts (1919).

Dwight would go on to serve as archivist of the Adams family archives in Quincy, Massachusetts; director of the Boston Public Library; and U.S. Consul at Vevey, Switzerland.

Upon their return, Adams went back to his position at Harvard, and their home at 91 Marlborough Street, Boston, became a gathering place for a lively circle of intellectuals.

[16] In 1877, his wife and he moved to Washington, DC, where their home on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, again became a dazzling and witty center of social life.

Adams went upstairs to her room to ask if she would receive the visitor and found his wife lying on a rug before the fire; an opened vial of potassium cyanide, which Clover had frequently used in processing photographs, lay nearby.

Her family had pressured Lizzie into a loveless marriage with Senator J. Donald Cameron, brokering a prenuptial agreement that provided her with the income from $160,000 worth of securities, a very large amount in 1878, equivalent to about $5 million in 2023.

The marriage was further strained by the Senator's coarseness and indifference and his fondness for bourbon and the world of political corruption he inhabited, which is reflected in Adams's novel Democracy.

"[25] Adams's wife, Clover, who had written a weekly letter to her father throughout her marriage except for the brief hiatus during her breakdown along the Nile, never mentioned concerns or suspicions about Henry's relationship with Lizzie.

... Henry Adams loved to shock his hearers, and I think he knew that those who were worth their salt would understand him and pick out of the knowledge which flowed from his lips the things which might be useful, and discard the cynicism as an old man's defense against his own urge to be [still] an active factor in the work of the world.

He was interred beside his wife in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.[29] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Considered a prominent Anglo-Saxonist of particularly the nineteenth-century, Adams has been portrayed by modern historians as anxious about the immigration of the era into the United States, particularly from Eastern Europe.

In any other form you have the burglar, the Jew, the Czar, the socialist, and, above all, the total irremediable, radical rottenness of our whole social, industrial, financial and political system.

It also accords with Adams's frequent laments that "the eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles" had been replaced with "a bankers' world" and that the "banking mind was obnoxious".

In the "Political Morality" chapter of the same volume he praises the Jewish statesman Benjamin Disraeli over the Gentiles Palmerston, Russell and Gladstone, writing: "Complex these gentlemen were not.

In short, he applied the physics of dynamical systems of Rudolf Clausius, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William Thomson to the modeling of human history.

In his 1909 manuscript The Rule of Phase Applied to History, Adams attempted to use Maxwell's demon as a historical metaphor, though he seems to have misunderstood and misapplied the principle.

"[45] In Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, Adams argues that the previous nineteen hundred years of civilization dating from the birth of Christ had been dominated by the feminine, fertile image of the Blessed Virgin, and that the industrial "dynamo" was a masculine, destructive force which would upend history.