Peter Drummey

Thursdays, March 15 - April 19 10:00 a.m. - 12noon 6 sessions
Prescott House, 55 Beacon Street

In the opening lines of The Education of Henry Adams, the author claimed that “had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple,” he could not have been “more distinctly branded” than he was by his birth in 1838 on Hancock Street, “in the shadow of Boston State House.” Whether he was so clearly marked by his birth and upbringing on Beacon Hill, Henry Adams stands out as the nation’s greatest historian of his own day, and a panel of experts has listed The Education first among the best English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

In this course we will sample Adams’s wide-ranging writings: in his youth he was a newspaper reporter, essayist, and biographer; in his mature years, a novelist and historian – first of American national history, and then of medieval art and architecture – an educational reformer and memoirist; and throughout his life an extraordinary letter writer. If Adams had worked in any one of these fields alone, he would be of interest to us, but in a six-session course we will make a rapid overview of his entire literary career. This will be a true seminar; the reading list will be ambitious, but not overwhelming. The most important component will be our in-class discussions of a series of wonderfully readable and varied works.

We will begin and end with The Education of Henry Adams, but along the way read some of Adams’s early essays and his novel Democracy; dip into his nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (at an opportune moment – we will be reading Adams’s classic account of the coming of the War of 1812 just as the bicentennial approaches), switch gears and centuries with Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, and then again to a subject of great modern-day interest in A Letter to American Teachers of History, and last, return to end with the second half of The Education, sampling Adams’s voluminous published correspondence all along the way. The last session of the course will be held at the Massachusetts Historical Society’s 1154 Boylston Street headquarters.

Peter Drummey

Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, has worked at the Society, surrounded by Henry Adams’s books and personal papers, for more than thirty years He has spoken to both scholarly and popular audiences – including C-Span’s “American Writers” series – on Henry Adams’s life and work, and has been the curator of exhibitions of his watercolors and photographs.