Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James....

In this new view of the greatest historian of the nineteenth century, historian Wills showcases Henry Adams's little-known but seminal study of the early United States and elicits from it fresh insights on the paradoxes that roil America to this day. Adams drew on his own southern fixation, extensive foreign travel, political service in Lincoln's White House, and much more to invent the study of history as we know it. His chronicle established new...

Television mini-series that dramatizes four generations of Adamses and 150 years of American history from the birth of the Revolution through the Gilded Age. Meet John Adams, a passionate revolutionary and second president; John Quincy Adams, proud son of a famous father and sixth president; Charles Francis Adams, skillful minister to Great Britain during the Civil War; historian Henry Adams; and railroad magnate Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Going beyond...