Happy birthday, Henry Brooks Adams

Henry Brooks Adams -- Harvard graduation photo. Adams lived to be 80 years old.

It is the birthday of journalist and historian Henry Brooks Adams (1868), whose posthumously-published The Education of Henry Adams (1918) won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. It tops the Modern Library’s list of the best 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. It deals with the author’s transition from the 19th century to the 20th. Adams also wrote the nine-volume History of the United States 1801-1817 (1889). It covers the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. President John Quincy Adams was his grandfather and President John Adams was his great-grandfather.

Legacy of Chief Justice John Marshall

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He didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence like his president, John Adams, did but John Marshall was about as busy as any one patriot could be.

He was a friend of George Washington and wrote his biography, he was a member of the U.S. House and a White House cabinet member, and he served as fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for 35 years, longer than any other Supreme Court Justice in history.

A letter he wrote in 1800, a few months before he became Chief Justice, is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It is framed along with an engraved portrait taken from a painting by Henry Imman, a noted New York artist. Asher Brown Durand, one of the best engravers in New York at the time, is responsible for the engraving. (Later Durand became one of the leaders of the Hudson River School painting style.)