Henry Adams and the Making of America

Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of Henry Adams as our nations greatest historian and his History as the "nonfiction prose masterpiece of the nineteenth century in America." Adams drew on his own southern fixations, his extensive foreign travel, his political service in the Lincoln administration, and much more to invent the study of history as we know it. His nine-volume chronicle of America from 1800 to 1816 established new standards for employing archival sources, firsthand reportage, eyewitness accounts, and other techniques that have become the essence of modern history. Ambitious in scope, nuanced in detail, Henry Adams and the Making of America throws brilliant light on the historian and the making of history.