The American historian and author Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) lived in an era of remarkable change and recorded the implications of the period with great perception. He is best known for "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres" and "The Education of Henry...

No American historian of the nineteenth century has so enchanted, irritated, and impressed his contemporaries and successors as Henry Brooks Adams. He was and is his country's greatest historian, and its most elusive. His achievement was various: he...

Henry Adams owes his popular reputation to a single work, The Education of Henry Adams. That book, which was privately printed in 1907 but not commercially published until just after the author's death in 1918, quickly made Adams famous, as he was...

Henry Adams lobbied for the Spanish-American War for years, ghosting speeches for key Senators, plotting with fellow hawks like Theodore Roosevelt, even visiting Cuba, Spain’s prize possession in the Western Hemisphere. But once the guns went off, he lost interest in the details, assuming that...

Chutzpah, the other night when I came to some lines on page 16 that I found shocking: My generaton of Jews was too young to fight against Nazism or for Israeli independence, too American to make aliyah (emigrate to Israel), too comfortable to put our...

Ishmael Beah, author of a best-selling memoir about his time as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, disputes newspaper reports that he had exaggerated his war service, telling The Associated Press on Wednesday that he will "stand by" what he wrote.The 27-year-old Beah, whose "A...

Like the conductor of his own chamber orchestra, Garry Wills presides over three metal music stands while at work in his study, his chosen "scores" including dictionaries of Greek, Latin and Italian.He might need, for example, to look up the Greek word "ekklesia," which appears...

A biography of American writer Henry Adams, who was the son of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. He political and historical writing contributed greatly to the early development of the U.S. democracy.