Best Selling Books by James Truslow Adams

Originally published in 1931 by Little, Brown, and Company.

Originally published as: James Truslow Adams: historian of the American dream, by Allan Nevins in 1968 by the University of Illinois Press.

Winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize in History.

This book, first published in 1933, examines the life and achievements of Henry Adams, the American historian and political journalist. It looks at his youth and early development of his ideas, and goes on to look at his time as a diplomat, historian and journalist – and his impact upon American political and intellectual life.

Originally published in 1933, and written by "America’s historian", James Truslow Adams, this volume tells the story of the rise of the American nation encompassing economics, religion, social change and politics from settlement to the Civil War. Due emphasis is given to the inter-connectedness of America with Europe – both in terms of cultural heritage and political and military entanglements. Extensive in size and scope and richly illustrated with half-tones and maps these volumes balance a historical narrative with philosophical interpretation whilst touching on as many aspects of American life and history as possible.

As one grows older and, let us hope, wiser, one becomes more and more shy of easy generalizations and classifications. As one moves through one’s world, the old generalized types, for example, of fiction and youth, standing for an “artist,” a Frenchman, or an Englishman, break into the many and varying individual artists or Frenchmen or Englishmen of one’s acquaintance, much as a ray of white light is broken into a rainbow of colors through a prism. But age and experience would be but poor substitutes for youth and freshness if they resulted only in bringing chaos to our minds, a substitution of multitudinous individuals for species and genus. If the old crude stock-in-trade types compact of ignorance and too facile generalizing have to be submitted to the spectrum of experience, individuals we find, in spite of seemingly baffling variety, do somehow combine to form distinct group types, and in the national sphere characteristics emerge that set one nation off from another even though their millions of inhabitants may differ among themselves almost more than some of them differ from foreigners. For a traveler constantly passing from one country to another and now long past the stage of mere romantic interest in the exotic, there is no more fascinating task than to attempt to establish the genuine characteristics of a nation out of the welter of individual impressions. It would be absurd to contend that America offers a simple problem to the observer. If the scene is less varied than in some other countries, nevertheless, to see about one only Babbitts means that one is not an acute observer. But as one comes back again and again from foreign countries, with fresh eyes and new standards of comparison, one comes to simplify our civilization in some respects, as a scientist does the continent. To the lover of scenery the Long Island beaches, the Big Smoky Mountains, the prairies, the Arizona desert, the golden coast of California, or the glaciers of Alaska offer variety in plenty; yet the geologist finds North America the simplest of all the great continents in the basic lines of its structure. In the same way, as we penetrate below the surface variety of its social life, we begin to see that its civilization is equally remarkable as that of the continent itself for its extreme structural simplicity. This simplicity lies in the fact that it has come to be almost wholly a business man’s civilization. It may be asked why, in a modern industrial world in which everyone must have money to live, and in which most people are engaged in making it in one way or another, is America any more of a business man’s civilization than that of any other country? The answer is to be found in a wide variety of social, economic, historic, geographic, and other factors. Let us, for example, contrast it with England, the country which I know best outside of my own, and where I happen to be writing at the moment. England has always been a great commercial and, for the last century, a great manufacturing country, the “nation of shopkeepers” in the eyes of European continentals. Business and trade are foundation stones of England’s prosperity and power, yet English civilization, whatever it may one day become, is not as yet a business man’s civilization in the same sense as is America’s. The reason is that the influence of the business man here upon society has been limited by the presence of other and very powerful influences stemming from sources other than business and having nothing to do with it. In the first place, there is that relic of feudalism, the aristocracy, including in its numbers, of course, many men and fortunes made by trade, but exerting its influence through a long tradition. It may be that “every Englishman loves a Lord”—though it is quite certain he does not worship him as do many American women—but it is true that the aristocracy exerts an influence upon the social manners and customs of the people at large which is incomparably greater than that exerted by the probably wealthier, but far less picturesque, untitled bankers, shipping merchants, iron manufacturers, and what not. In the country—still the best source of English life, though fast passing—aristocracy and landed gentry possess so great an influence that if a nouveau riche wishes to become somebody, he does not take a great house and give costly entertainments in London but buys an estate somewhere in the “counties” and painfully tries to make his way among families that may have but a fraction of his own wealth.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1931.

The story of adult education in American from earlierst days to its various ramifications in the present. Adult education on the frontier was largely education by living. Its lessons learned the hard way. Dr Adams looks at what part has been played, in the education of American men and women by numerous forums, lyceums and chautauquas, correspondence schools, people''s institutes, summer camps and various organisations.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1940.

This Pulitzer Prize awarded history interrogates the discovery and first settlement of the region; the genesis of the religious and political ideas which there took root and flourished; the geographic and other factors which shaped its economic development; the beginnings of that English overseas empire, of which it formed a part; and the early formulation of thought-on both sides of the Atlantic-regarding imperial problems. Contents: The American Background Staking Out Claims The Race for Empire Some Aspects of Puritanism The First Permanent Settlement New England and the Great Migration An English Opposition Becomes a New England Oligarchy The Growth of a Frontier Attempts to Unify New England Cross-Currents in the Confederacy The Defeat of the Theocracy The Theory of Empire The Reassertion of Imperial Control The Inevitable Conflict Loss of the Massachusetts Charter An Experiment in Administration The New Order

Reprint of the original, first published in 1934.