Illustration of a portrait of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Brooks Adams

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• Imagine that The Education of Henry Adams will be published in 2007. What technological symbols could be used to interpret the twentieth century and prepare for the twenty-first century? Imitating the style Adams uses in his work, discuss those symbols in terms of their historical force through a description of an imagined event, like a World’s Fair of the year 2005.

• Compare the use of evolutionary theory in intellectual discourse of the late nineteenth century with the genetic explanations offered today. What are the dangers of popular usage of scientific theories? What are the benefits of making science transparent and accessible?

• Explain the attraction that railroads have for Adams. What has happened over the last century to that rail network? What sort of analysis might Adams make of this change?

• Coal is still our number one source for energy. What other sources of energy have been developed over the last century? Are those energy technologies sufficient to meet current and future needs? Discuss the challenges of energy policy in a particular country with reference to that country’s historical development.

• Select one of the many utopian novels written between Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and the general publication of The Education of Henry Adams (1918). Compare the idea of the new human Adams puts forth to inhabit a technologically complex world to the ideal put forth by Utopian Socialists.

• Jared Diamond, in his ‘‘Epilogue’’ to Guns, Germs, and Steel, discusses how history might become just as scientific as some natural sciences in which experimentation is impossible (like astronomy). Compare Diamond’s reasoning with Adams’ ideas on a scientific history. What future does history have as a science?

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