A Great Historian Comes to the Web

The writings of William Robertson, an historian of the 18th century, who was once considered one of the finest craftsmen of the grand, stately English prose of that era, which enjoyed the work of Samuel Johnson and David Hume and many another great prose stylist, have found their way to the web. At last! Robertson is surely one of the most obscure of the great English-language historians. Yet Yvor Winters considered Robertson’s work some of the finest prose literature ever written in the English language. The eight volumes of Robertson’s collected works have been out of print for nearly a century. For the first time ever, Robertson’s obscure histories have been published on the web as page images, pdf files, and text files. They can be found at:

http://www.archive.org/details/worksofwmroberts01robeiala

Yvor Winters wrote only once -- and only briefly -- of Robertson, in his essay on Henry Adams, which can be found in In Defense of Reason. A major section of that essay concerned Adams’s obscure history of the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, inclusive of the War of 1812 (about which I have written on this blog). Winters considered this obscure work to have been Adams’s finest achievement. Selections from Adams’s long-neglected work itself have been issued in a fine new edition, which includes a laudatory preface from American historian Gary Wills. In the course of his discussion of Adams’s historical writings, Winters paused to give an overview of what he judged to be the greatest historical literature in English. This section of the Adams essay is only about four pages long, but it has long been of great interest to me. Winters mentions seven other historians besides Adams as the finest writers of historical literature in our language: Englishmen David Hume, Edward Gibbon, William Robertson, and Thomas Babbington Macauley, and Americans William Hicking Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman.

William Robertson lived from 1721 to 1793. He was a leading historical figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment, though he has long been almost entirely forgotten in modern times. He was one of the trio of historians, with David Hume and Edward Gibbon, who profoundly shaped European cultural consciousness in his time, especially concerning the idea of empire and colonization. A fairly recent book on his role in this intellectual movement, William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, offers essays from many historians and scholars on Robertson's achievement, particularly his treatment of the theme of empire and European expansion. But the best place to start with Robertson is his histories themselves.

Winters was drawn to historical literature as literary art, in part, by the scholarship of J.B. Black, who wrote a superb and compelling book on history as literature in the 1930s, entitled The Art of History. I have read this splendid book (which has been long out of print) and also quite a bit in the works of William Robertson. Both Black and Robertson are well worth your time. Robertson’s major subjects include a history of Scotland, a history of Charles V and his era (a study which was finished by the American Prescott almost a century later), and the history of the Spanish discoveries and conquests in the Caribbean and Central America -- as Robertson called it, from the perspective of the 1780s, The History of America.

Let me pause to consider a broad side issue. The time has long been ripe for a reconsideration and an enlargement of Winters’s views on history as literature. No Wintersian I know of has undertaken to re-assess his ratings of the greatest historians or individual historical works. Nor has anyone tried to determine and re-assess the criteria he employed in making these ratings. Nor, further, has anyone sought to uncover exactly how his theories of poetry and, perhaps more pertinently, fiction are related to his theory of historical literature -- nor to advance the brief and general ideas that formed his theory. Yet another notable matter that deserves some consideration is why Winters’s judgments on historical literature are so much less controversial than those on poetry.

But I should turn back to William Robertson. His first major work was The History of Scotland During the Reigns of Queen Mary and James VI. This long work, which occupies the first couple volumes in the collected works, was published in 1758. It was a huge success in the public and among scholars. Its style and content had widespread appeal because Robertson studied the emerging Scotland of his present in light of a sometimes hostile, even insular past. After spending a long time on his deep study of Imperial Emperor Charles V, which was published in 1768, Robertson turned to a new historical project which he had mentioned in that book's preface. He wrote that he had not discussed New World colonization in Charles V for reasons of coherence, though he noted that his account of Europe in the 16th century was incomplete without it. The project was to include the history of Spanish, Portuguese, and British colonization, but Robertson chose to concentrate on the Spanish, which was naturally rooted in his study of Charles V.

Although Robertson’s original intention was to complete a full history of New World colonization before going to press, he decided to publish his study of the 16th-century Spanish conquest and colonization alone. I have read that this was because the events of 1776 had changed the direction his narrative was taking. The History of America, released in 1777, gathered considerable attention on the continent, where it was deemed Robertson's masterpiece. It went through nine editions between 1777 and 1780. Without doubt, The History of America reveals the Eurocentric limits of Robertson’s thinking. It has been said that it presents a less than supportive report on America’s first peoples while concealing, downplaying, or explaining away the many European barbarities of the era. Yet Robertson does get the facts in there, for the most part -- even if he does not interpret and judge those facts quite the way in which we would nowadays.

Robertson wrote a lapidary, polished prose of great movement and precision. As a stylist, he is the near equal of Hume, though this is not the common judgment. Hume achieved greatness in Winters’s eyes through his great History of England, which Winters praised very highly. Robertson also was a superb classical stylist who deserves your attention, even if it will take a bit of time and effort to become accustomed to his dense, measured style. Here’s a long sample from The History of America, "Volume 6" in the Collected Works:

About half a century after Marco Polo, sir John Mandeville, an Englishman, encouraged by his example, visited most of the countries in the east which he had described, and, like him, published an account of them. The narrations of those early travellers abound with many wild incoherent tales, concerning giants, enchanters, and monsters. But they were not, from that circumstance, less acceptable to an ignorant age, which delighted in what was marvellous. The wonders which they told, mostly on hearsay, filled the multitude with admiration. The facts which they related from their own observation, attracted the attention of the more discerning. The former, which may be considered as the popular traditions and fables of the countries through which they had passed, were gradually disregarded as Europe advanced in knowledge. The latter, however incredible some of them may have appeared in their own time, have been confirmed by the observations of modern travellers. By means of both, however, the curiosity of mankind was excited with respect to the remote parts of the earth; their ideas were enlarged; and they were not only insensibly disposed to attempt new discoveries, but received such information as directed to that particular course in which these were afterwards carried on.

While this spirit was gradually forming in Europe, a fortunate discovery was made, which contributed more than all the efforts and ingenuity of preceding mariner's ages to improve and to extend navigation. That wonderful property of the magnet, by which it communicates such virtue to a needle or slender rod of iron, as to point towards the poles of the earth, was observed. The use which might be made of this in directing navigation was immediately perceived. That valuable but now familiar instrument, the 'mariner's compass,' was constructed. When, by means of it, navigators found that, at all seasons, and in every place, they could discover the north and south with so much ease and accuracy, it became no longer necessary to depend merely on the light of the stars and the observation of the sea-coast. They gradually abandoned their ancient timid and lingering course along the shore, ventured boldly into the ocean, and, relying on this new guide, could steer in the darkest night, and under the most cloudy sky, with a security and precision hitherto unknown. The compass may be said to have opened to man the dominion of the sea, and to have put him in full possession of the earth, by enabling him to visit every part of it. Flavio Gioia, a citizen of Amalfi, a town of considerable trade in the kingdom of Naples, was the author of this great discovery, about the year one thousand three hundred and two. It hath been often the fate of those illustrious benefactors of mankind, who have enriched science and improved the arts by their inventions, to derive more reputation than benefit from the happy efforts of their genius. But the lot of Gioia has been still more cruel; through the inattention or ignorance of contemporary historians, he has been defrauded even of the fame to which he had such a just title. We receive from them no information with respect to his profession, his character, the precise time when he made this important discovery or the accidents and inquiries which led to it. The knowledge of this event, though productive of greater effects than any recorded in the annals of the human race, is transmitted to us without any of those circumstances which can gratify the curiosity that it naturally awakens. But though the use of the compass might enable the Italians to perform the short voyages to which they were accustomed, with greater security and expedition, its influence was not so sudden or extensive as immediately to render navigation adventurous, and to excite a spirit of discovery. Many causes combined in preventing this beneficial invention from producing its full effect instantaneously. Men relinquish ancient habits slowly, and with reluctance. They are averse to new experiments, and venture upon them with timidity. The commercial jealousy of the Italians, it is probable, laboured to conceal the happy discovery of their countryman from other nations. The art of steering by the compass, with such skill and accuracy as to inspire a full confidence in its direction, was acquired gradually. Sailors unaccustomed to quit sight of land, durst not launch out at once and commit themselves to unknown seas. Accordingly, near half a century elapsed, from the time of Gioia's discovery, before navigators ventured into any seas which they had not been accustomed to frequent.

This measured, stately prose can still stand as a model of English as a classical language: well reasoned, dignified, ordered. It uses a technique of accumulation that Yvor Winters prized highly, as Robertson gradually lays brick upon brick in his argument and builds an edifice of understanding. Like the best in a great era in prose era -- known for its clarity, urbanity, precision, and periodic expressiveness -- Yvor Winters’s own prose has the ring of Robertson’s, I think, more so than some of the other prose stylists that he thought had achieved greatness, Johnson or Hume or Adams.

I must note that two recent studies of Robertson, however obscure he is, have been published. The first I have mentioned, Cambridge University Press’s 1997 book, William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, which is part of its "Ideas in Context" series. I have skimmed this book and found it a beneficial addition to the recent bicentennial emphasis on Edward Gibbon. The essays as a collection are of great value to our understanding not only of Robertson but also of important aspects of 18th-century literary culture. It opens new ways of studying Robertson’s importance to historiography and to English culture in his time. The second recent volume is Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820, by Mark Salber Phillips, published by Princeton University Press (2000). Phillips’s study appears to be a dense study of the importance of changing conceptions of history in the time of William Robertson. In the following passage from the first chapter, note that Phillips draws attention to the general idea that the passage I have quoted from Robertson also deals with, commercial and technological advance (in specific the compass):

The power of commerce, however, only gives us the beginnings of the eighteenth century’s groping toward a new definition of its historical interests. A much wider spectrum of subjects is implied when the Monthly reviewer speaks, for example, of the need for “knowledge of the internal economy of the state, or the private situation of individuals.” As is so often the case, it is easiest to say what was displaced: gone, certainly, was the old restriction of history to statecraft and military maneuver —- and with it an easy accommodation to the clarity and linearity of classical ideals of narrative. In its place stood a much wider, but less easily defined set of concerns for which contemporaries did not really have a name, though philosophical history was a useful term for designating the literary form that did its best to encompass all the parts of this expanded subject. As the philosophical histories of Hume, Robertson, and others attest, the “matter” that history now needed to “imitate” (to adopt the terms of Aristotle’s Poetics) had enlarged itself enormously. It incorporated not only commerce and navigation, but the history of literature, of the arts and sciences, of manners and customs, even of opinion and sentiment. It needed to consider the experiences of women as well as of men, of “rude nations” living without the institution of property, as well as of those of commercial societies. But this diversity of subject matter was only a part of the problem; a further challenge was added by the belief that to write history at its highest level would mean being able to describe the underlying connectedness of all of these different aspects of life in the past, each of which was acquiring a literature of its own.

Phillips is accurate in his description that William Robertson concerned his three major histories with much more than political action. I hope you’ll take some time to explore Robertson’s work. You certainly don’t need to start with "Volume 1," which concerns medieval Scotland, and labor on to the end to the collected writings. Just stroll into Robertson’s account of some time period that you’ve always been interested in to give him a try. The sweep and complications of European politics at the time of the early Reformation in The History of Charles V might be particularly enlightening. Robertson is sure-footed and at times brilliant in his study of Charles V’s snarled conflict with the King of France, Francis I, a lengthy and complicated quarrel that can be thoroughly bewildering.

A Brief Evaluation of Henry Adams’s History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison

So Winters thought it was great, even “very great,” as a work both of literature and of history, as you read here last week. But how might I evaluate Winters’s evaluation? And what have other Wintersians thought of this work? This post contains my brief, provisional assessment. Still, I offer these comments with some trepidation. For you will see in a moment that I do not regard Adams’s History quite as highly as Winters did.

First, before going through my views, I want to mention that few Wintersians have ever mentioned, let alone discussed, the issue of how good Adams’s History might be as a work of literary art. David Levin, an American historian (and a fine writer, by the way) who was a colleague of Winters’s at Stanford for a time in the 1960s, has written essays on history as literature on occasion during his career. Yet his one extended study of the subject, a book entitled History as Romantic Art, only mentions Adams’s History in passing, though he does refer with approval to its reputation as one of the great histories of American scholarship. Otherwise, no critic or scholar who has studied Winters with any degree of sympathy has tried to study history as literature, assess Winters’s discussion of the subject in his 1943 essay concerning Henry Adams, or directly studied Adams’s History as a work of literary art. It would appear that every writer, critic, or scholar who has read Winters’s writings on history as literature and specifically on Adams’s History has decided that these issues are not worth considering -- except for me, Ben Kilpela, though I, of course, cannot be classified as writer, critic, or scholar. That makes me wonder, as it should, whether the issues I am considering in this post are important to any degree. But I will press on in the belief that they are. Perhaps I’m ahead of my time. (If I am, I am a long, long, LONNNNG way ahead.)

So now, as to my judgment of Adams’s History, I should start by emphasizing that rather than focusing on narrating what appear to be the major events of the time, the History concentrates heavily on studying American congressional politics during the Jefferson and Madison administrations as influenced by those larger events. Adams guides us through a serpentine study of various political and diplomatic maneuverings at the beginning of period of America's growth into one of the world’s powers (which I think, as you will see, was rather predictable) and as an innovatory federal republic espousing democracy. Critical opinion appears to be rising ever so slightly and slowly that the History is the first great history written about the U.S.A. Some have even said that it might be the first great work of history written by an American, though I would quibble with that. The achievements of William Hickling Prescott in the history of New Spain and Francis Parkman in the history of New France perhaps exceed Adams’s achievement, as literature, and they both wrote before Adams.

Some few critics have gone so far as to claim that Adams’s work rivals Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in eloquence and sweep. But such a claim can mislead you. Gibbon’s grand story of imperial deterioration is quite different. Gibbon concerned himself with the long, slow slide to downfall of a vast, widely dominant, and highly and broadly influential empire over more than 1000 years, while Adams studied the way the government of a peculiar new country, governed in daringly new ways, quickly became more centralized at a time when some of its leaders opposed the consolidation and increase of federal power and as that country, unexpectedly at the time, began to loom on the horizon of the world scene. These occurrences took place, I should pause to note, when Napoleon was devising his outrageously grandiose plans for conquest, which he believed would lead to a prosperous and enlightened European empire under his rule. The provincial and fledging United States, in 1800 -- large in landmass, stupendously rich in natural resources, small in population, undeveloped in culture, unsure and unsteady in government, largely untried in the political and social freedoms it espoused -- overcame many obstacles to rise by 1817 from its national adolescence into a state of rapidly increasing international power and prestige. These changes appear rather puzzling because they came about under the leadership of two U.S. presidents who were candidly skeptical about the benefits of a strong central government and the trappings of deep involvement in the game of international power politics. Gary Will’s study of the History, Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005), draws attention to how Adams gave us some startling insights into the discordant principles and practices of the 1800-1816 period that shape America to this day.

My judgment, briefly -- and humbly standing in disagreement with Yvor Winters -- is that the History, though a superb work of historical scholarship and at times superbly written, is not one of our greatest histories as a work of literary art. I will have to save a comprehensive case for some later date, but let me say this much: I think that, in general, Adams burrowed far too deeply into the details of congressional maneuvering. Many of his long accounts of the twistings and turnings of political debate are simply too long. Further, in my judgment, the rise of the U.S.A. into one of the world’s powers during the years before and during the War of 1812 should not have been so surprising. The magnificently abundant resources and progressive social system that the U.S. enjoyed in its early years almost made it certain that the new country would rise quickly in power and influence. After much study of the matter, I think Adams’s History exaggerates the backwardness of the U.S. at the same time that Adams ignores the many obvious conditions and circumstances that almost inevitably propelled the country to a much higher status than people imagined it would achieve in the early days of the Republic.

Further, Adams, too often, paid far too much attention to details of secondary or even lesser importance, at the same time he paid far too little attention to many crucial aspects of the development of the U.S. in the period he put under study. For example, limiting my examples to Jefferson’s first term:

1) Adams pays too much attention to diplomatic wrangling in his consideration of the Haitian Revolution. Though certainly these matters played a part in affairs, they are less important than what led Napoleon to offer Louisiana and what the resulting purchase meant for the development of the country. Adams, I believe, did not need to go into such great detail on diplomacy but should have spent a great deal more time trying to fathom the causes and meaning of France’s abandonment of its last major possession in the New World.

2) Adams gets far too tangled in the tidbits of the congressional negotiations over the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Samuel Chase. Though the Chase trial is probably interesting to those with interests in the development of congressional politics and the status of the judiciary in our country, the bearing of the Chase affair on the central themes of the History is never adequately established. I believe the significance of the Chase Affair is far less than implied by Adams’s highly detailed account of political wrangling associated with Chase’s impeachment.

3) Adams gets far too tangled up as well in the details of the political intrigues of the so-called Conspiracy of 1804, the shaky political scheme in which a number of political leaders in the northern states considered seceding from the Union. He also concentrates too tightly on the less important details of political deal-making. Further, Adams fails to arrive at just and satisfying general conclusions about the overall long-term meaning of the conspiracy. Thus, Adams finds the conspiracy important for the wrong reasons.

These examples stand as three of the main reasons I consider the History not to be one of the greatest histories as literary art. Yet it is far from worthless. It is a superb work of literature and history -- just not one of the greats. I can say that I learned some important facts and concepts from the History and recommend it, though it is best read in small doses. It’s so long as well and covers such a short and relatively minor period of American history. Should one put one’s treasured time to Adams or to other works of historical art? The flaws I have pointed out in the History point me to the one larger reasons that I think other greats of historical literature deserve your attention first. This period, 1800-1816, is just not as important as Adams seems to have believed it is -- and now as Gary Wills clearly believes it to be. The whole subject matter of Adams’s History is of tertiary importance in the study of this country, let alone of the study of world history. Therefore, if the History’s value as a work of literature is not as great as Winters claimed and its importance as history is less than Wills takes it to be, I believe that you can wait to read it somewhere down the road, if you find the time.

It’s important to note, nonetheless, that the obscure period Adams put under study has received too little attention. This time, 1800 to 1816, when the young American nation was developing political habits that are much, much less familiar to us than the immediately preceding periods, the periods of the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and then Washington’s and James Adams’s presidencies. Yet it was in the years of Jefferson’s and Madison’s presidencies that the men who formed the American democratic system that Americans live within gradually chose and negotiated the ways in which our democracy would be conducted. Their choices and compromises -- accidental, willed, or forced -- played a significant role in making us what we are today. It’s an occasionally absorbing story (putting aside Adams’s excessive detail on political wrangling), especially Adams’s focus on the difficulties of Congressional politics, which seems a bit foreign to us nowadays, since the American Presidency became so ascendant over the course of the 20th Century. Also, despite the weaknesses in Adams’s coverage of the Conspiracy of 1804, I learned many interesting details about the attitudes of our early legislators and leaders toward the concept of union and what they might have meant to the development of America’s style of democracy.

Before closing, I want to return briefly to Gary Wills’s book on Adams’s History. In Wills’s opinion, Adams's innovations as a historian were far more than technical -- as Yvor Winters also pointed out. Though I do not have the training to judge the matter, Wills claims that Adams made many important advancements in the writing of history, especially in the use of contemporary documents in his account. Wills believes that Adams’s central, very broad, and overarching theme was an ironic view of the legacy of Jefferson and Madison. Wills claims that Adams argued for a theory that though these two presidents tried to protect the young country from "foreign entanglements," a standing army, a central bank, and excessive federal bureaucracy -- dreaming of an agrarian society untroubled by "big government," which could lead to the dangers of renewed tyranny that the country had escaped in the Revolution -- by the end of their presidencies they found that they had played a large part in permanently establishing all these conditions in American society. Wills sees what happened, through Adams’s History, as a fundamental expression of the "American paradox." He believes this paradox defines us today in our struggles for an idealized desire for isolation and political simplicity against the growth and intermingling of political, economic, and military forces. This is why Wills find Adams’s History such an important study. But the idea appears to owe more to Wills than to Adams. I think that Wills overplays this theme, though it is certainly there in Adams. It is just not so strongly emphasized as Wills claims, in my judgment. Nor is it exactly a paradox. It’s just the difficulties that would inevitably beset a very large, astonishingly prosperous country dedicated to liberty. Also, as I have noted, I think that Adams misrepresents a number of events in the era, and one of the biggest is his inability to see that the geographic conditions of the new country inevitably pushed it forward as one of the great nation-states.

In summary, my provisional conclusion about Adams’s History, offered with considerable humility, is that it is a fine work of literature but has some weaknesses and flaws that keep me from judging it to be one of the great works of literature. I also believe that it is not concerned with subject matter of the highest importance. Nonetheless, the New York Review of Books publishing imprint has given us a smaller book of selections from the History that can help you decide whether to read it and judge for yourself (see my previous post on this subject).

A Winters Discovery Finds New Admirers -- At Last!

Yvor Winters didn’t actually “discover” Henry Adams’s History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, but he was the only major literary critic I know of to pay any attention to the work or to judge it as a great work of prose in the decades after Adams’s History lapsed nearly into oblivion. No literary critic I know of has even thought to address such questions as whether histories are works of literary art or which histories should be appraised as the very finest works of “artistic“ history that we have. Moreover, few were the historians, as far as I have studied the matter, who paid much attention to Adams’s History during the period of Winters’s career (not to mention afterward) or evaluated it as one of the great works of history. Rather, Adams’s History had been almost wholly forgotten -- “undiscovered” as it were -- until Winters first wrote of it in 1943. Winters’s evaluation, nonetheless, was that it was one of the greatest works of prose literature ever written in English, a claim which he made in his long essay that is mostly censorious toward Adams, “Henry Adams, or the Creation of Confusion,” from the book The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), which was reprinted in In Defense of Reason (1947). I have read Adams’s History, in case you’re wondering as you read the rest of this post.

In his essay on Adams, Winters, following his oft-used taxonomic method, went through in about ten pages his summary of the great works of history written in English, considered as expository prose literature, and offered a number of trenchant and mildly provocative judgments and observations. His brief overview is inspiring and revolutionary, perhaps mostly by implication -- and sadly it’s much too short. Winters never returned to the subject of history as art to expand significantly upon this one discussion. He should have written a book on the matter.

He did discuss history as a literary art form, with great insight into the nature of history as literature, on one more occasion: his essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” (reprinted in The Function of Criticism), in which he compared history to fiction as part of his radical examination of the artistic value of different literary genres. In that essay he made a relatively unusual claim about any work of literature, even for him: Winters called Adams’s History “very great.” It appears that by the 1950s Winters had grown to judge the History even more highly than he had a decade before and had begun to think of it as better than every other work of English-language history besides Macauley’s History of England. But he never offered any case for making this more exalted claim about the History, nor, as I mentioned, did he ever expand or refine his discussion of the great histories as literary art after the Adams essay. This is an area in which a Wintersian critic could do some good and very important work: devising, expanding, and making cases for the selections for a Winters Canon of the great works of historical literary art.

The specific new admirer of Henry Adams’s History is Gary Wills, one of America’s finest popular scholars and best nonfiction writers. The History concerns itself with the political development of the American Republic during a short period of its national adolescence, from 1800 to 1816. A dozen years ago, the History was issued in a beautiful Library of America edition. I went out right away and picked up the two volumes and read them through. In 2005, Wills released an erudite study of the History, which I will come back to in a moment. The latest news, from late in 2006, came from the New York Review of Books publishing imprint, which released a book of important passages from the History, which was originally published in nine volumes in the late 19th century and was out of print for a couple decades (though available in most university libraries, where I first obtained it). The NYRB book-long collation is entitled The Jeffersonian Transformation: Passages from the "History". The NYRB’s promotion contains some information on its new book.

The “Introduction” to this collation was written by Garry Wills. I have posted an illuminating and nicely turned excerpt from the “Introduction” as the first comment to this post.

I have looked over the NYRB book, and it appears to be a useful selection. For those new to the rigors and pleasures of Adams’s History, which is very little known, this collation should serve as a good companion to Adams's History itself.

Though this new book might foster some discussion, absent for the last 60 years, on Adams’s work on the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, I have little hope that it will inspire deeper discussion of history as a literary art -- not even among critics who have interests in or sympathies with Winters. For not even among that tiny group has there been any discussion of, or any attempt at an assessment of, Winters’s theories concerning history as an art form. I am pondering why this has happened. In the meantime, I will post my provisional assessment of Adams’s History on this blog next week. In time, I hope we will find occasion to return both to Adams’s History in greater depth and even to the broad subject of history as literary art on this blog.

Finally, I wish to note that Will’s book on Adams was the subject of a fine review essay, “The Unread Masterpiece,” in the New York Review of Books by one of America’s finest historians, Edmund S. Morgan (see the 11/17/05 issue of the NYRB; the essay is not available on line except by subscription). Morgan considered Wills’s assessment of the main themes of the History a little off the mark and exaggerated. Wills soon after wrote a brief letter, published in the 12/15/05 issue of the NYRB, in defense of his interpretation of Adams. This letter and a bit more are available at the NYRB site.

Once again, an excerpt from Gary Wills’s “Introduction” to the NYRB collation of passages from Adams’s History is attached as the first comment to this post.