Search results for ""Adams""

John Adams’s shaping of the vice presidency dominates this volume of the Papers of John Adams, which chronicles a formative era in American government spanning June 1789 to February 1791. As the first federal Congress struggled to interpret the US Constitution and implement a new economic framework, Adams held fast to federalist principles and staked out boundaries for his executive powers. Meeting in New York City, Adams and his colleagues warred over how to collect revenue and where to locate the federal seat. They established and staffed the departments of state, treasury, and war. Adams focused on presiding over the Senate, where he broke several ties. Enduring the daily grind of politics, he lauded the “National Spirit” of his fellow citizens and pledged to continue laboring for the needs of the American people. “If I did not love them now, I would not Serve them another hour—for I very well know that Vexation and Chagrine, must be my Portion, every moment I shall continue in public Life,” Adams wrote. He plunged back into writing, using his Discourses on Davila to synthesize national progress with republican history. Whether or not the union would hold, as regional interests impeded congressional action, remained Adams’s chief concern. “There is every Evidence of good Intentions on all sides but there are too many Symptoms of old Colonial Habits: and too few, of great national Views,” he observed. Once again, John Adams’s frank letters reveal firsthand the labor of nation-building in an age of constitutions.

Read more less

A new chapter in John Adams's diplomatic career opened when the Dutch recognized the United States in April 1782. Operating from the recently purchased American legation at The Hague, Adams focused his energies on raising a much needed loan from Dutch bankers and negotiating a Dutch-American commercial treaty. This volume chronicles Adams's efforts to achieve these objectives, but it also provides an unparalleled view of eighteenth-century American diplomacy on the eve of a peace settlement ending the eight-year war of the American Revolution.John Adams was a shrewd observer of the political and diplomatic world in which he functioned and his comments on events and personalities remain the most candid and revealing of any American in Europe. His correspondence traces the complex negotiations necessary to raise a Dutch loan and throws new light on his conclusion of a treaty of amity and commerce with the Netherlands, achievements of which he was most proud. Events in England and elsewhere in Europe also provided grist for his pen. Would the establishment in July of a new ministry under the earl of Shelburne hinder or advance the cause of peace? That question bedeviled Adams and his correspondents for the fate of the new nation literally rode on its answer. The volume ends with Adams's triumphal departure from The Hague to face new challenges at Paris as one of the American commissioners to negotiate an Anglo-American peace treaty.

Read more less

Historical figures have overheard students saying 'history is boring' - and now they've decided to quit history! When Abigail Adams decides there's more to life than doing chores in the White House, she escapes to become a Caribbean pirate. Can siblings Abby and Doc fix history before things get too mixed up? Or will they be the ones who need to be rescued? This is the second book in the Time Twisters series, a new historical fiction chapter book series from three-time National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin. Using his in-depth knowledge of famous historical figures, Sheinkin has created exciting adventures with historical figures going AWOL, hilarious trips through time, and totally true fun facts about each subject. For example, female pirates did rule the high seas in the early 1700s!

Read more less

The death of a legendary actress reveals a wealth of Hollywood secrets in a breathtaking novel about betrayal, rivalry, and the punishing brutality of fame.One of the brightest stars of Hollywood’s golden age was Lily Adams, the beloved picture of all-American innocence. Why she suddenly vanished from the spotlight was a mystery even to those closest to her.Upon Lily’s death seventy years later, her granddaughter, Carolyn Prior, struggles to understand a woman she loved but never really knew. Then, sifting through the memorabilia of a once-glamorous career, Carolyn comes across a letter from her grandmother. It’s the trembling admission of a secret life and a story that begins and ends with superstar Stella Lane, Lily’s archrival of the silver screen—a bombshell who was brutally murdered.As Carolyn unearths her grandmother’s connection to the notorious unsolved slaying, her life collides with Lily’s in the most sh

Read more less

Paul Howard is a journalist, author and comedy writer best known as the creator of the No 1 bestselling Ross O'Carroll-Kelly series. He has won a record four Irish Book Awards and is a former Irish Sports Journalist of Year and Irish Newspaper Columnist of the Year.

Read more less

Adventure, history, and the drama of family life intertwine in this engrossing tale of a fifth-grade girl struggling to find her place after her mom remarries and she finds herself stuck with a younger stepbrother. Find out what happens when Ava and her newly blended family take a trip to Boston, where she buys a magic bobblehead and is unexpectedly transported to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Ava and her stepbrother, J. P., travel back and forth with John and Abigail Adams and their children, from Massachusetts, to Philadelphia, to the White House, to France, she learns about history, friendship, and how to deal with new situations, including her recently blended family. This sequel to The President and Me: George Washington and the Magic Hat features some of the same characters.

Read more less

Micky Adams has a football CV as long as your arm, having put in 438 appearances as a full-back - for teams such as Gillingham, Leeds, Fulham and Southampton, followed by a management career that took in over a dozen clubs at every tier of English football. As a manager, Adams took the helm at some of the biggest clubs in the English football, including Leicester City, Brighton & Hove Albion, Nottingham Forest, Coventry City, Port Vale and Fulham, winning four promotions and a league title, as well as a reputation for bringing success and stability in often difficult environments. In this extraordinary autobiography, written with veteran sports writer and long-time friend Neil Moxley, Micky Adams reveals the truth behind incidents on and off the pitch, including what really happened at La Manga, where three Leicester City players were accused of sexual assault during a mid-season training break, and what it was like to play with Alan Shearer and Matt Le Tissier in one of the most enduring careers in football.

Read more less

The American victory at Yorktown in October 1781 and the fall of Lord North’s ministry in March 1782 opened the possibility that John Adams might soon be involved in negotiations to end the war for American independence. To prepare for the occasion, Adams and Benjamin Franklin discussed in their letters the fundamentals for peace. Adams made it clear to the British government that there would be no negotiations without British recognition of the United States as independent and sovereign.This volume chronicles Adams’s efforts, against great odds, to achieve formal recognition of the new United States. The documents include his vigorous response to criticism of his seemingly unorthodox methods by those who would have preferred that he pursue a different course, including Congress’s newly appointed secretary for foreign affairs, Robert R. Livingston.In April 1782 the Netherlands recognized the United States and admitted John Adams as its minister. For Adams it was “the most Signal Epocha, in the History of a Century,” and he would forever see it as the foremost achievement of his diplomatic career. The volume ends with Adams, at long last a full-fledged member of the diplomatic corps, describing his reception by the States General and his audiences with the Prince and Princess of Orange.

Read more less

Using simple language that beginning readers can understand, this lively, inspiring, and believable biography looks at the childhood of Abigail Adams. Illustrated throughout.

Read more less

This glorious 12 in x 12 in full color 14-month calendar on glossy stock, is the first devoted to the legendary BATMAN, X-MEN and TARZAN artist. Adams comic-book work serves as a benchmark and inspiration for every illustrator who works in the field to this day. His success at Marvel and DC Comics led to cutting-edge advertising work, stage design, amusement park ride design, magazine illustration & paperback book covers. This 14-month calendar features both rare and classic works.

Read more less

John and Abigail Adams remained fully engaged in American political life after they left Washington, DC, for retirement in Quincy. A highlight of Volume 15 of Adams Family Correspondence is a series of letters between Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson that debated fundamental questions of the nation’s tumultuous early years. A new generation rose in prominence in the period covered in the volume, with John Quincy Adams returning from abroad to take a seat in the United States Senate just in time to break with the Federalists and support the Louisiana Purchase. The family commented on other events of the era—Jefferson’s dismantling of John Adams’s judicial reforms, the mobilization of the US Navy for the Barbary wars, the growing bane of British impressment, and the duel that killed Alexander Hamilton.Equally compelling family stories emerge in the volume’s 251 letters. The failure of a British banking firm proved calamitous to the family’s finances, compelling John Quincy to quietly finance his parents’ retirement. Thomas Boylston Adams, acting as an occasional editor of the Port Folio, carved out his public persona as a man of letters. Louisa Catherine Adams wrote of motherhood and adjusting to a new country of residence while providing a spirited perspective on Washington society. As always, the heart of Adams Family Correspondence is Abigail Adams, who survived a near-fatal fall to continue providing letters of insight and wit that once again show why the correspondence of the Adams family is a national treasure.

Read more less

Celebrate the creative vision of iconic artist and environmentalist Ansel Adams year-round with this hard-working, wire-bound desk planner, featuring smudge-proof writing paper and generous room for organizing weekly schedules. Ansel Adams' 'Authorized Edition' calendars have been a beloved annual tradition for over 35 years. This 2021 engagement calendar includes: Fifty-two spectacular black and white photographs by Ansel Adams, including some previously unpublished images, carefully selected and sequenced to reflect the changing seasons. Spacious 9' x 9.4' week-by-week format. Nature scenes from Yosemite National Park, Glacier National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and more. The perfect inspirational gift for lovers of fine art, photography, National Parks, and the outdoors. Photographs are printed in rich duotone on specialized photo paper, making each image suitable for fram

Read more less

How did Gerry Adams grow from a revolutionary street activist - in perpetual danger of arrest and assassination - into the leader of Sinn Féin, with intimate access to the British and Irish prime ministers and the US president? And how did he outlast them all? Drawing on newly available intelligence and scores of exclusive interviews, Malachi O'Doherty's meticulously researched biography sheds light on the history of this extraordinary shape-shifter. O'Doherty's experience as a journalist, as a correspondent during the peace process and as a commentator on Northern Irish affairs, informs this authoritative account of one of the world's most controversial politicians.

Read more less

The years 1790 to 1793 marked the beginning of the American republic, a contentious period as the nation struggled to create a functioning government amid increasingly bitter factionalism. On the international stage, the turmoil of the French Revolution raised important questions about the nature of government. As usual, the Adams family found itself in the midst of it all. Vice President John Adams chaired Senate sessions even as he was prevented from participating in any meaningful fashion. Abigail joined him when her health permitted, but even from afar she provided important advice and keen observations on politics and society.All four Adams children are well represented here, especially Charles and Thomas Boylston, who, for the first time, appear as correspondents in their own right. Both embarked on legal careers, Charles in New York and Thomas in Philadelphia, while John Quincy did the same in Boston. Daughter Nabby cared for her growing family as her ambitious husband, William Stephens Smith, pursued financial schemes. This volume offers both insight into the family and the frank commentary on life that readers have come to expect from the Adamses.

Read more less

This volume offers over 300 letters from the irrepressible Adamses, including many between John and Abigail never before printed. As always, Adams family members serve as important observers of and commentators on national and international events, from America’s growing tensions with Britain and France to its internal struggles with increasingly virulent political factionalism and the Whiskey Rebellion. John, languishing as vice president in Philadelphia, reported extensively on congressional debates and growing divisions within the Washington administration but also found time to improve his sons’ legal education. Abigail’s letters juxtapose her own political insights with lively accounts of her farm management and the day-to-day happenings in Quincy.The most significant event of the period for the Adams clan was John Quincy’s appointment as U.S. minister resident at The Hague, the beginning of a long and storied diplomatic career. Accompanying him overseas was his brother Thomas Boylston, the only Adams child who had not yet seen Europe. Arriving just as the French Army began its final march into the Netherlands, John Quincy and Thomas Boylston became first-hand observers of the European war and the impact of the French Revolution on the broader society. Back in the United States, Charles continued to build his legal career, expanding his law office and acquiring two clerks, while Nabby’s family grew with the birth of the Adamses’ first granddaughter, Caroline Amelia Smith.

Read more less

The letters in this volume of Adams Family Correspondence span the period from July 1795 to the eve of John Adams’s inauguration, with the growing partisan divide leading up to the election playing a central role. The fiery debate over funding the Jay Treaty sets the political stage, and the caustic exchanges between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans only grow as rumors surface of George Washington’s impending retirement. From Philadelphia, John’s equanimity in reporting to Abigail and his children on the speculation about the presidential successor gives way to expectation and surprise at the voracity of electioneering among political allies and opponents alike. Although remaining in Quincy throughout this period, Abigail offers keen, even acerbic, commentary on these national events.From Europe, John Quincy and Thomas Boylston shed light on the rise of the French Directory, the shifts in the continental war, and the struggles within the Batavian government. Their letters also testify to the broader scale of the U.S. presidential election by chronicling French and British attempts to influence American politics. On a more personal note, John Quincy’s engagement to Louisa Catherine Johnson in London opens the next great collection of correspondence documenting the Adams family saga.

Read more less

The Education of John Adams is a concise biography of John Adams (1735-1826), the first by a biographer with legal training. It examines his origins in colonial Massachusetts, his education, and his struggle to choose a career and define a place for himself in colonial society. It explores his flourishing legal career and the impact that law had on him and his perception of himself; his growing involvement with the emerging American Revolution as polemicist, as lawyer, as congressional delegate, and as diplomat; and his role in defining and expounding ideas about constitutionalism and how it should work as the governing ideology of the new United States. The book traces his part in launching the new government of the United States under the U.S. Constitution; his service as the nation's first vice president and second president; and his retirement years, during which he passed from being a vexed and rejected ex-president to the Sage of Braintree. It describes the relationships that sustained him--with his wife, the brilliant and eloquent Abigail Adams; with his children; with such allies and supporters as Benjamin Rush and John Marshall; such sometime friends and sometime adversaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson; and with such foes as Alexander Hamilton and Timothy Pickering. It establishes Adams as a key but neglected figure in the evolution of American constitutional theory and practice. It also is the first biography to examine Adams's conflicted and hesitant ideas about slavery and race in the American context, raising serious questions about his mythic status as a friend of human equality and a foe of slavery. The focus of this book is the record left by Adams himself - in diaries, letters, essays, pamphlets, and books. The Education of John Adams concludes by re-examining the often-debated question of the relevance of Adams's thought to our own time.

Read more less

Adams: Britain's Oldest Potting Dynasty is a lavishly illustrated account of Britain's oldest potting family, chronicling their fascinating history through an unequalled five-hundred-year tenure and providing intimate glimpses of members of this ancient lineage from their first mention in the historic record in 1448 through to the middle of the 20th century. From attempted murder to associations with an archetypal regency rake and tales of intrepid travellers, the Adams family's colourful history unfolds through the lives of this inspirational family and their extensive connections.

Read more less

Follow Adam in this tale as he looks forward to his first day at school. He is keen to meet his teacher and make dozens of friends. What will he learn in his first lesson? A short yet compelling story with rhymes that will captivate the children reading it.

Read more less

Discover even MORE farm facts from the UK's favourite farmer!Answering over 40 questions from children just like you, Adam will show you what it's like to really work on a farm. Questions like: How are sheepdogs trained? How do farms grow things like breakfast cereal and birthday cake Can cows ACTUALLY predict when it's going to rain? From Countryfile presenter, Adam Henson, Curious Questions From Adam''s Farm is a jam-packed fact book for tractor-obsessed, animal-loving toddlers and young readers.Breaking down everything from farm equipment to animal friendships, it's the perfect gift for any child who wants to know more about life on a farm.

Read more less

In 1941 Ansel Adams was hired by the United States Department of the Interior to photograph America's national parks for a series of murals that would celebrate the country's natural heritage. Because of the escalation of World War II, the project was suspended after less than a year, but not before Adams had produced this group of breathtaking images, which illustrate both his early innovations and the shape of his later, legendary career as America's foremost landscape photographer.The invitation to photograph the nation's parklands was the perfect assignment for Adams, as it allowed him to express his deepest convictions as artist, conservationist, and citizen. These stunning photographs of the natural geysers and terraces in Yellowstone, the rocks and ravines in the Grand Canyon, the winding rivers and majestic mountains in Glacier and Grand Teton national parks, the mysterious Carlsbad Caverns, the architecture of ancient Indian villages, and many other evocative views of the American West demonstrate the genius of Adams' technical and aesthetic inventiveness. In these glorious, seminal images we see the inspired reverence for the wilderness that has made Ansel Adams' work an enduring influence on the intertwining spirits of art and environmentalism, both so necessary for the preservation of our natural world.

Read more less

“I cannot O! I cannot be reconcil’d to living as I have done for 3 years past… Will you let me try to soften, if I cannot wholy releave you, from your Burden of Cares and perplexities?” So begins Abigail Adams’s correspondence to her husband in these volumes: a plea to end their long separation, as John Adams represented the United States in Europe while Abigail tended to family and farm in Massachusetts, and passed on to John crucial political information from Congress.In October 1782, the Adams family was as widely scattered as it would ever be, with young John Quincy Adams in St. Petersburg, John at The Hague, and Abigail in Braintree with her daughter and younger sons. With the summer of 1784, however, Abigail would have her fondest wish, as most of the family reunited to spend nearly a year together in Europe. As the Adams family traveled, and as the children came of age, so their correspondence expanded to include an ever larger and more fascinating range of Cultural topics and international figures. The record of this remarkable expansion, these volumes document John Adams’s diplomatic triumphs, his wife and daughter’s participation in the cosmopolitan scenes of Paris and London, and his son John Quincy’s travels in Europe and America. These pages also welcome Thomas Jefferson, who soon became one of Abigail’s closest friends, into the family correspondence. From the intimacies of the children’s education, sentimental and worldly, to the details of the firm friendship between Abigail and Madame Lafayette, to the grand drama of Edmund Burke and William Pitt the Younger debating in Parliament, the contents of these letters draw an incredibly rich picture of international life in the 1780s and an incomparable portrait of America’s first family of politics and letters.

Read more less

The period of June 1836 to February 1840, from Charles Francis Adams’s twenty-eighth to thirty-second year, was characterized by his turn from the political activities that had occupied him for the preceding several years. The course of the Van Buren administration he had helped to elect dissatisfied him, the Massachusetts Whig leadership had earned his distrust, positions on political issues that would either echo or oppose those being vigorously espoused by his father, John Quincy Adams, he felt inhibited from avowing publicly. So confronted, Charles found occupation in preparing and expressing himself on economic matters of moment—banking and currency—and moral questions generated by the slavery issue. With increasing effectiveness he employed the lecture platform and the press for the expression of views to which he felt free to attach his name. On all these matters he found his opinions at odds with the prevailing ones held among those prominent in the Boston scene, as John Adams and John Quincy Adams had found before him. Yet, despite a sense of loneliness, so induced, his participation in the varied social life of the city has its place in the Diary.However, activities in Boston and its environs that provided a focus for the record of the preceding years give way in these volumes to wider scenes made available by train and ship. An extensive journey with his wife by way of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal to Niagara and Canada, a visit of some length and interest in Washington, and stays of lesser length in New York City are recounted.Wide and persistent reading, the theater, numismatics, and the building of a summer home in Quincy also occupied him and are fully reflected in his journal. Family tragedies are not absent from its pages. As the period comes to its close his long and distinguished labors as editor of the family’s papers had begun. A new self-assurance has become evident.

Read more less

Before he achieved his dream of being an internationally known rock personality, Ryan Adams had a band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Whiskeytown led the wave of insurgent-country bands that came of age with No Depression magazine in the mid-1990s, and for many people it defined the era. Adams was an irrepressible character, one of the signature personalities of his generation, and as a singer-songwriter he blew people away with a mature talent that belied his youth. David Menconi witnessed most of Whiskeytown’s rocket ride to fame as the music critic for the Raleigh News & Observer, and in Ryan Adams, he tells the inside story of the singer’s remarkable rise from hardscrabble origins to success with Whiskeytown, as well as Adams’s post-Whiskeytown self-reinvention as a solo act.Menconi draws on early interviews with Adams, conversations with people close to him, and Adams’s extensive online postings to capture the creative ferment that produced some of Adams’s best music, including the albums Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker. He reveals that, from the start, Ryan Adams had an absolutely determined sense of purpose and unshakable confidence in his own worth. At the same time, his inability to hold anything back, whether emotions or torrents of songs, often made Adams his own worst enemy, and Menconi recalls the excesses that almost, but never quite, derailed his career. Ryan Adams is a fascinating, multifaceted portrait of the artist as a young man, almost famous and still inventing himself, writing songs in a blaze of passion.

Read more less

A man’s twenty-seventh year is “critical,” according to Charles Francis Adams. And so his proved to be. Twenty-five at the start of these volumes, Adams had yet to embark on the public career that would mark him a statesman, but by their conclusion he had been drawn into the maelstrom of politics. It was an unwilling plunge, dictated by what both he and his father, John Quincy Adams, regarded as betrayal of the elder Adams by Daniel Webster and his Whigs. Once in, however, he showed himself politically adept.This diary, kept from January 1833 to June 1836 and hitherto unpublished, has elements of hidden personal drama. Through private meetings and caucuses and newspaper articles signed with pseudonyms, the younger Adams found effective means to carry on political activities in the face of dilemmas posed by his father’s public prominence, his father-in-law’s contrary persuasions, and his own preferences. He emerged with growing self-respect and solid accomplishment as political journalist—his initial vocation.The diary has fresh disclosures also about the personality of John Quincy Adams, shrewdly assessed by an observer uniquely placed to interpret domestic scenes as well as the greatly waged struggles in Washington against the Southern “slaveocracy” and “gag rules.”Colorful figures in Boston’s political and social life are finely etched in outspoken appraisals characteristic of the Adamses. The diarist shows acuteness too in comments on books, sermons, paintings, the theater, and opera.

Read more less

The letters in these volumes, written from both sides of the Atlantic, addressed by and to members of the Adams family, chronicle nearly five years of its history, They were years in which John Adams in successive missions to Europe, accompanied first by one son, then by two, initiated what would be a continuing role for Adamses in three generadons: representing their country and advancing its interests in the capitals of Europe.John Adams, a troubled but stouthearted Yankee lawyer on the vast new scene of Europe, though always circumspect in familial correspondence in referring to public matters, provides, in his revealing letters about his own health and state of mind, sufficient insight into the difficult relations among the American commissioners, the designs of America's allies, and the diplomatic failures and triumphs he experienced in Paris and the Netherlands to permit some reevaluations of purposes and tactics. With these high matters are mingled the rigors and rewards of travel, concern with his sons' education, books for their reading, Dutch cloth and ribbons for his wife.Whether Mrs. Adams' letters relate to the upbringing of children, the problems of wartime taxes and inflation, the inferior roles assigned to American women, or her wide historical reading, they bear the marks of distinction of mind and mastery of language that make them timeless.If the letters of these two are central, those written by others are hardly less interesting, relating as they do to the concerns of young John Quincy at school in Levden and his observations on his way to and during his stay in St. Petersburg at age fourteen: to the adventure-filled return voyage of Charles, aged eleven, to America; to the interests of the younger Abigail maturing in Braintree; to the reactions of sturdy patriots to the tides and rumors of war.

Read more less

On the heels of David McCullough's phenomenal No.1 New York Times bestseller JOHN ADAMS, a lively and authoritative biography of Adams's 'dearest friend.'

Read more less

In 1941, Ansel Adams photographed America's national parks for a series of murals that would celebrate the country's natural heritage. Because of the escalation of World War II, the project was suspended after less than a year, but not before Adams had produced these images, which illustrate both his early innovations and the shape of his later, legendary career as America's foremost landscape photographer. The invitation to photograph the nation's parklands was the perfect assignment for Adams, as it allowed him to express his deepest convictions as artist, conservationist, and citizen. These stunning photographs of the natural geysers and terraces in Yellowstone, the rocks and ravines in the Grand Canyon, the winding rivers and majestic mountains in Glacier and Grand Teton national parks, the mysterious Carlsbad Caverns, the architecture of ancient Indian villages, and many other evocative views of the American West demonstrate the genius of Adams' technical and aesthetic inventiveness. In these glorious, seminal images we see the inspired reverence for the wilderness that has made Ansel Adams' work an enduring influence on environmentalism as well as art.

Read more less

An ordinary boy. The most EXTRAORDINARY, stinkiest superpower!Some months have past since Aldrin Adams discovered his extraordinary SUPERPOWER. When he eats CHEESE, just before he goes to sleep, he can enter into other people's dreams . . . and their nightmares! He's learned when to eat blue cheese (to help with nightmares about KILLER toys), smoked cheese (to help him recover from using his powers) and good old Cheddar (TOP SECRET). He's also come face to face with his nemesis - A MYSTERIOUS SUPERNATURAL VILLAIN who creates NIGHTMARES for millions of children every night.Aldrin survived, but only JUST. And now what is he supposed to do? Save the world, one SCARY CLOWN nightmare at a time? Shouldn't being a superhero be more adventurous than this? Is there a way to beat his Nemesis once and for all?Find out, as Aldrin navigates his new life, meets more people with powers like him and - finally - faces his NEMESIS again!

Read more less

On September 3, 1783, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay signed the definitive Anglo-American peace treaty. Adams and his colleagues strived to establish a viable relationship between the new nation and its largest trading partner but were stymied by rising British anti-Americanism. Adams’ diplomatic efforts were also complicated by domestic turmoil. Americans, in a rehearsal for the later Federalist-Antifederalist conflict over the United States Constitution, were debating the proper relationship between the central government and the states. Adams, a Federalist as early as 1783, argued persuasively for a government that honored its treaties and paid its foreign debts. But when bills far exceeding the funds available for their redemption were sent to Europe, he was forced to undertake a dangerous winter journey to the Netherlands to raise a new loan and save the United States from financial disaster.None of the founding fathers equals the candor of John Adams’ observations of his eighteenth-century world. His letters, always interesting, reveal with absolute clarity Adams’ positions on the personalities and issues of his times.

Read more less

Vice President John Adams and the US government faced a turbulent world of rebellion in this volume of the Papers of John Adams, which chronicles the period from March 1791 to January 1797. The grim shadow of the French Revolution and the whirlwind of a massive European war left political leaders like Adams struggling to uphold the young nation’s neutrality. “I Suffer inexpressible Pains, from the bloody feats of War and Still more from those of Party Passions,” he observed. With the federal system newly in place, fresh challenges crept in on all sides. Adams and his colleagues sought to bolster the government against the effects of the Whiskey Rebellion, a seething partisan press, a brutal yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, and violent clashes with Native peoples on the Ohio frontier. Working with George Washington and an increasingly fractious cabinet, Adams approached a set of issues that defined US foreign policy for decades to come, including the negotiation, ratification, and funding of the controversial Jay Treaty, as well as the awkward cultivation of ties with France. Revealing exchanges to Adams from son John Quincy, a junior statesman who sent rich reports from war-torn Europe, underline the family’s enduring commitment to public service. Pausing on the cusp of his presidency, John Adams amplified his lifelong dedication to sustaining democracy, amid bouts of internal and external crisis: “I am happy that it has fallen to my share to do some thing towards setting the Machine in motion,” he wrote.

Read more less