The following is a list and discussion of important scholarly resources relating to John Adams.
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1st Vice President of the United States 2nd President of the United States
State of the Union Address Publications Vice Presidential and Presidential elections Post-presidency  | ||
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]
Two years after a review on the Jefferson Papers, historian Bernard Bailyn published "Butterfield's Adams: Notes for a Sketch" (1962), a review of the first four volumes of the Adams Papers, including the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, edited by Lyman Butterfield as well as editorial assistants Leonard Faber and Wendell Garrett. Butterfield released the volumes on September 21, 1961, to great fanfare in newspaper reviews, advertisements, Massachusetts Historical Society receptions, American Academy of Arts dinners, and a Washington, D.C. luncheon with President John F. Kennedy. Bailyn prefaced his own review with support for publication and readership, but explicit disdain for the "vagueness of the impression left" by the publicity and hype, as well as a cautionary observation that the "vagueness" could counterintuitively add the volumes to the "great slag-heap of unread scholarship." [3]
In Bailyn's sketch for this William and Mary Quarterly review, John Adams embodied a jumble of ambitions, fears, desires, irrationalities, and integrities. In the first four volumes of his Papers, at least, Bailyn assessed Adams as a man who constantly engaged in "dramatic objectification of himself and the world he saw," with bombastic "humor" that "flowed naturally." But it was the "problems and tensions" that ostensibly caught Bailyn by surprise---"between ambition and integrity, between the desire to appear knowing and sophisticated and the inability to be so, between the longing to retreat into a sensitive inner world of feeling and the need for self-mastery." Adams experienced an "extended adolescence" that came to an abrupt end "around his thirtieth year," close to the time he courted and wed Abigail Adams née Smith. Both the Diary and Autobiography, according to Bailyn, evinced this change, which was a crucial facet in or "our early national history." Change, however, was not transformation. The "problems and tensions" prior to this shift, in Bailyn's sketch, "continued to shape his, and in part the nation's, history." Adams was still a man of "stubborn" and "flamboyant, integrity...and he never lost his sensuous, physical response to the things and the people around him." Adams almost perpetually guarded his vulnerable "self-esteem" with frequent "self-assertion," a defensive posturing that eventually became "paranoiac" during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. [3]
As Bailyn's fledgling interpretations of the Stamp Act Crisis and the "meaning of certain of the ideals and ideas of the American Revolution" engulfed this world of John Adams, conspiratorial thought abounded. [3] For Bailyn's sketch, the perception and conception of conspiracy in the John Adams 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 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." For the Adams in Bailyn's sketch, Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson clearly had deployed "influence to advance not only his own career but that of his personal following 'to the exclusion of much better men.' " When Hutchinson and his "place seeking" collided with the apocalyptic duties and acts imposed by King-in-Parliament after the French and Indian War, "Adams's social animosities took fire and became the source of a flaming hatred of state authority."
Bailyn's conclusion to the review turned John Adams psychologically inward and then constitutionally outward---gasping, grasping, writing, and theorizing for "control." After "long years of raking self-examination and an extraordinary sensitivity to other people's feelings and motivations," Bailyn's sketch envisioned an Adams who "saw more darkness than light" and "powerful irrationalities" in the "human passions" that were his own, yet also grappled with this "flaming hatred of state authority." As result, "his political theory was an effort to express in the constitutional language of his day the implications of this dark, introspective psychology." In this regard, Bailyn averred, Adams seemed more akin to "Calvinist forebears and of the twentieth century than of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment." Bailyn's comparisons to "political theory," resting on "dark, introspective" psychological implications "of the twentieth century," requires further scholarly inquiry. In any case, this "political theory" made Adams into "a passionate advocate of the separation of powers---governmental and social---and of maintaining a competitive balance among them." Adams the constitutional architect believed that "behavior by the favored few would continue to exist; it could not be eliminated; but it might be controlled, to some extent at least, by confining its expression...allow the aristocracy, however it might be defined [class or rank?], a legal, constitutional role in government, but limit it to a special institution, the traditional middle chamber." Conversely, or perhaps self-critically, Adams proposed another chamber to "control" and mutually counterweigh, in state authority, "the force of the many as well as of the few…the popular element of the constitution must also be constrained, sealed off, confined. It too must be subject to law interpreted by a fully independent judiciary and enforced by a powerful, impartial, in effect disciplinarian, executive." In the final analysis, Bailyn's sketch of Adams depicted a man who feared in humanity, and perhaps more in himself, "those elements of ambition, of irrationality, and of sensuous satisfaction with which he had fought so fiercely and so knowingly...He knew no peace, and saw no peace for mankind, until they too were brought under control." [3]
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Among the Committee of Five charged by the Second Continental Congress with drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was the document's primary author. Following the American Revolutionary War and prior to becoming president in 1801, Jefferson was the first U.S. secretary of state under George Washington and then the nation's second vice president under John Adams.
The Republican Party, retroactively called the Democratic-Republican Party, and also referred to as the Jeffersonian Republican Party among other names, was an American political party founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the early 1790s that championed republicanism, individual liberty, equal rights, decentralization, free markets, free trade, agrarianism, and sympathy with the French Revolution. The party became increasingly dominant after the 1800 elections as the opposing Federalist Party collapsed.
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Aaron Burr Jr. was an American politician and lawyer who served as the third vice president of the United States from 1801 to 1805 during Thomas Jefferson's first presidential term. His legacy is defined by his famous personal and political conflict with Alexander Hamilton, which culminated in the Burr–Hamilton duel in Weehawken, New Jersey on July 11, 1804, during which Burr mortally wounded Hamilton, who died from his wounds the following day.
Abigail Adams was the wife and closest advisor of John Adams, as well as the mother of John Quincy Adams. She was a founder of the United States, and was both the first second lady and second first lady of the United States, although such titles were not used at the time. She and Barbara Bush are the only two women to have been married to U.S. presidents and to have been the mothers of other U.S. presidents.
Thomas Hutchinson was an American merchant, politician, historian, and colonial administrator who repeatedly served as governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the lead up to the American Revolution. He has been described as "the most important figure on the loyalist side in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts". Hutchinson was a successful merchant and politician who was active at high levels of the Massachusetts colonial government for many years, serving as lieutenant governor and then governor from 1758 to 1774. He was a politically polarizing figure who came to be identified by John Adams and Samuel Adams as a supporter of unpopular British taxes, despite his initial opposition to Parliamentary tax laws directed at the colonies. Hutchinson was blamed by British Prime Minister Lord North for being a significant contributor to the tensions that led to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War.
The XYZ Affair was a political and diplomatic episode in 1797 and 1798, early in the presidency of John Adams, involving a confrontation between the United States and Republican France that led to the Quasi-War. The name derives from the substitution of the letters X, Y, and Z for the names of French diplomats Jean-Conrad Hottinguer (X), Pierre Bellamy (Y), and Lucien Hauteval (Z) in documents released by the Adams administration.
The Founding Fathers of the United States, commonly referred to simply as the Founding Fathers, were a group of late 18th century American revolutionary leaders who united the Thirteen Colonies, oversaw the War of Independence from Great Britain, established the United States, and crafted a framework of government for the new nation.
The Adams family was a prominent political family in the United States from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. Based in eastern Massachusetts, they formed part of the Boston Brahmin community. The family traces to Henry Adams of Barton St David, Somerset, in England. The two presidents and their descendants are also descended from John Alden, who came to the United States on the Mayflower.
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The presidency of George Washington began on April 30, 1789, when Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1797. Washington took office after the 1788–1789 presidential election, the nation's first quadrennial presidential election, in which he was elected unanimously. Washington was re-elected unanimously in the 1792 presidential election, and chose to retire after two terms. He was succeeded by his vice president, John Adams of the Federalist Party.
John Adams was an American statesman, attorney, diplomat, writer, and Founding Father who served as the second president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. Before his presidency, he was a leader of the American Revolution that achieved independence from Great Britain. During the latter part of the Revolutionary War and in the early years of the new nation, he served the U.S. government as a senior diplomat in Europe. Adams was the first person to hold the office of vice president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. He was a dedicated diarist and regularly corresponded with important contemporaries, including his wife and adviser Abigail Adams and his friend and political rival Thomas Jefferson.
This bibliography of George Washington is a selected list of written and published works about George Washington (1732–1799). A recent count has estimated the number of books about George Washington at some nine hundred; add scholarly articles with Washington's name in the title and the count climbs to six thousand.
The Federalist Era in American history ran from 1788 to 1800, a time when the Federalist Party and its predecessors were dominant in American politics. During this period, Federalists generally controlled Congress and enjoyed the support of President George Washington and President John Adams. The era saw the creation of a new, stronger federal government under the United States Constitution, a deepening of support for nationalism, and diminished fears of tyranny by a central government. The era began with the ratification of the United States Constitution and ended with the Democratic-Republican Party's victory in the 1800 elections.
John E. Ferling is a professor emeritus of history at the University of West Georgia. As a leading historian in the American Revolution and founding era, he has appeared in television documentaries on PBS, the History Channel, C-SPAN Book TV, and the Learning Channel.
The bibliography of Thomas Jefferson refers to published works about Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. Biographical and political accounts for Jefferson now span across three centuries.
The Adams Papers Editorial Project is an ongoing project by historians and documentary editors at Massachusetts Historical Society to organize, transcribe, and publish a wide range of manuscripts, diaries, letterbooks and politically and culturally important letters authored by and received by the family of Founding Father John Adams, his wife Abigail Adams and their family, including John Quincy Adams. Over 27,000 records have been catalogued to date. Administrators of the database also track the location and content of Adams related materials at other scholarly institutions. By virtue of its collaborative nature, the project simultaneously sheds light on the lives of John Adams’ fellow Founding Fathers George Washington, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.
John Adams (1735–1826) was an American Founding Father who served as one of the most important diplomats on behalf of the new United States during the American Revolution. He served as minister to the Kingdom of France and the Dutch Republic and then helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris to end the American Revolutionary War.
The history of U.S. foreign policy from 1776 to 1801 concerns the foreign policy of the United States during the twenty five years after the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). For the first half of this period, the U.S. f8, U.S. foreign policy was conducted by the presidential administrations of George Washington and John Adams. The inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1801 marked the start of the next era of U.S. foreign policy.
The following is a list of works about the spouses of presidents of the United States. While this list is mainly about presidential spouses, administrations with a bachelor or widowed president have a section on the individual that filled the role of First Lady. The list includes books and journal articles written in English after c. 1900 as well as primary sources written by the individual themselves.
