Adams, Henry [Brooks]
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...
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