Henry Adams and the Need to Know

"The great-grandson of John and Abigail Adams, Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) did not follow his forefathers in a presidential or congressional line of succession. He may however be said to represent a culminating phase of his family's robust intellectual tradition. Historian, novelist, biographer, memoirist, and travel writer, informed commentator on issues pertaining to ethics, economics, gender, geology, and post-Newtonian physics, Adams may be the nearest resemblance to a Renaissance man ever to appear in the United States, and the insights generated by his diverse inquiries engage readers to this day." "To many he speaks with unprecedented urgency. For Henry Adams at the turn of the twentieth century, as for his successors in the twenty-first, the relation of mind to a world remade by technology and geopolitical conflict largely determines the destiny of civil life. Henry Adams and the Need to Know presents fourteen essays that articulate Adams's ongoing interest to both scholarly and general readerships, stressing his eclecticism and his need to clarify the role of critical intelligence in public life." "Adams's work appeals to a wide spectrum of historical and literary inquiry and claims a place in multiple scholarly contexts. The topics covered in this volume range from New England politics to hegemonic foreign policies, from the aesthetics of portraiture to representations of the exotic place, from the ambiguities of gender to the ambitions of the human mind. Here, leading scholars explore often overlooked details of Adams's relationships with people and ideas. They reopen settled topics and reframe truisms. Each essay affirms, in one way or another, that to study Adams is to discover his continuing and astonishing relevance."--Jacket.