Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918) was an American historiographer, journalist & novelist.

Natural around Boston into one of the united states's virtually all large families (two his great-grandfather and his grandfather had been Presidents of the United States), Adams, after his graduation from either Harvard in 1858, embarked on the Grand Tour of Europe, during which he likewise attended lectures inside civil law at the University of Berlin.

Within 1861 his father, Charles Francis Adams, was appointed minister to England by Lincoln, and Henry Adams accompanied him when his personal secretary. Inside 1868 he returned to the United States and settled down inside Washington, D.C., where he started working as a journalist. Adams saw himself as a hidebound hungriness for the popular ideal of the 17th and 18th centuries. Accordingly, he was lament in exposing political corruption in his journalistic pieces.

Around 1870 Adams was appointed Professor of Medieval History at Harvard, a position he held until his early retirement inside 1877, aged only 39. That month he returned to Inland northwest, in which he continued working as a historiographer. In the 1880s Adams also wrote ii novels: Democracy was published anonymously in 1880 and immediately became popular. (Simply when Adams's demise did his publisher reveal Adams's authorship.) His more novel, published under a nom de plume of Frances Snow Compton, was Esther (1884).

Inside 1885 Marian Adams, his wife, committed suicide. Upon her demise Adams took higher the restless life as a world traveler, travelling extensively &, for years, spending summers within Paris and winters in Wa. Inside 1907 he published his Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. A operate caring a birth of forces Adams saw when replacing Christianity. For Adams a cathedral around Amiens, France, experienced embodied a old globe when a dynamo represented a just released. A novel is agreed by several to exist as a first non-nonfictional prose act of the 20th century.

Inside 1912 Adams suffered a incapacitating stroke; inside 1918 he died at his home in Wash., D.C.

As a historian, Adams is considered to have been a number one (inside 1874 -1876) to conduct historical seminar work in the United States. His magnum opus is his History of the United States (1801 to 1817) (Nine vols., 1889-1891). These are particularly notable for its account of the diplomatic relations of the United States in the time of this period, & for its essential nonpartisanship. Adams likewise published Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), John Randolph (1882), and Historical Essays (1891), besides editing The Writings of Albert Gallatin (Threesome volumes, 1879) and, unitedly with H. C. Lodge, Ernest Young and J. L. Laughlin, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law (1876).

Henry Adams's brothers come too notable:

His sr. brother, John Quincy Adams (1833 - 1894), the graduate of Harvard (1853), practised law, & was a Popular member for many terms of the Massachusetts general court. Within 1872 he was nominated for vice-president per Popular faction that refused to trend lines Horace Greeley.

Another brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1835 - 1915), graduated at Harvard in 1856, and served on the Union side in the Civil War, receiving in 1865 the brevet of brigadier-general in the regular army. He was president of the Union Pacific Railroad from 1884 to 1890, having antecedently be widely called an authority on the management of railways. Among his writings come Railroads, Their Origin and Problems (1878).

Another brother, Brooks Adams (1848 - 1927), practised law. His writings include A Law of Civilization & Decompose (1895), ''America's Economic Supremacy (1900), and A Up to date Empire'' (1902).