The following is a list and discussion of scholarly resources relating to John Adams.
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Personal 1st Vice President of the United States
2nd President of the United States
State of the Union Address Publications Vice Presidential and Presidential elections Legacy ![]() | ||
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: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)Adams' grandson Charles Francis Adams Sr. edited the first two volumes of The Works of John Adams, Esq., Second President of the United States. These were published between 1850 and 1856 by Charles C. Little and James Brown in Boston. The first seven chapters were produced by John Quincy Adams. [1]
The premier modern biography was Honest John Adams, a 1933 biography by the noted French specialist in American history Gilbert Chinard, who came to Adams after writing his acclaimed 1929 biography of Jefferson. For a generation, Chinard's work was regarded as the best life of Adams, and it is still an important text in illustrating the themes of Adams' biographical and historical scholarship. Following the opening of the Adams family papers in the 1950s, Page Smith published the first major biography to use these previously inaccessible primary sources; his biography won a 1962 Bancroft Prize but was criticized for its scanting of Adams' intellectual life and its diffuseness. In 1975, Peter Shaw published The Character of John Adams, a thematic biography noted for its psychological insight into Adams' life. The 1992 character study by Joseph Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, was Ellis's first major publishing success and remains one of the most useful and insightful studies of Adams' personality. In 1992, the Revolutionary War historian and biographer John E. Ferling published his acclaimed John Adams: A Life, also noted for its psychological sensitivity. [1] David McCullough authored the 2001 biography John Adams , which won various awards and was the basis for a 2008 TV miniseries. [2]
In 1962, historian Bernard Bailyn published "Butterfield's Adams: Notes for a Sketch", a review of the first four volumes of the Adams Papers, including the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, edited by Lyman Butterfield. As Bailyn's fledgling interpretation of the "meaning of certain of the ideals and ideas of the American Revolution" engulfed Adams' worlds, conspiratorial thought in the Diary became both cause and consequence of "abstractions---glittering generalities", bound to a "concreteness", a "sensuous imagination and tactile grasp of reality...by 1774 he [Adams] was convinced that he was witnessing the culmination of a deliberate conspiracy 'against the public liberty...first regularly formed and begun to be executed in 1763 or 4.' The result, unless the plot were exposed and destroyed, would be tyranny---not some vague, unfamiliar historical tyranny but one imposed by people he knew, executed by hands he had shaken." In Bailyn's sketch, when nepotism by Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson sparked a powder keg of apocalyptic duties and acts imposed by King-in-Parliament, "Adams's social animosities took fire and became the source of a flaming hatred of state authority." [3]