The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

His quest, in many of his books, was to find evidence of change and to chart–beginning at some still point–the process of transformation through the use of data drawn from economic output, coal production, ship size and speed. I do know, however, that he would be fascinated by the size of the ships, and the “economies of force,” to employ his phrase, represented by the developments in maritime power plants would hold him mesmerized, because what truly interested Henry Adams by 1907 was change and transformation, particularly the way in which the forces that propelled change simultaneously served as indicators of that very transformation.

I do not think that Adams would comment extensively on how history repeats itself, nor would he necessarily agree with Karl Marx who, in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, wryly noted that historical events occur “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” In fact, I am not even sure that the historical correspondences in my introductory anecdote would have particularly interested Adams. It displaces 97,500 tons, and carries a crew of approximately 5,000. Bush’s declaration was made from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. On May 1, 2003, President Bush declared that the mission was accomplished in Iraq, that the shock and awe tactics of the short war had led to victory, though the succeeding years have witnessed persistent guerrilla warfare that threatens to spread throughout the country, if not the entire region. It displaced 16,000 tons, and carried a crew of 827.Ī century after the appearance of Adams’s masterpiece, the United States appears to be somewhere beyond the apex of its imperium, and it finds itself seeking to extricate itself from its latest intervention into a foreign territory, this time in Iraq. The ship’s length was 456 feet, 4 inches. The flagship was the recently commissioned USS Connecticut, a coal-powered battleship. navy–later dubbed the “Great White Fleet”–to sail around the world in a show of power designed to announce that the United States intended to be a player in international politics far beyond its immediate sphere of influence.

In 1907, Roosevelt dispatched sixteen ships of the U.S. On July 4, 1902, President Roosevelt declared that the war was won, though guerrilla fighting continued throughout the archipelago for years.

defeat of the Spanish empire in 1898 would mean their independence. It had recently fought its first Southeast Asian war to suppress Filipino rebels who, understandably, anticipated that the U.S. In 1907, as Henry Adams began passing around copies of The Education of Henry Adams to a select group of friends and associates, the United States was in the early stages of its imperium.

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams