John Adams Running Thread

[Herbert Anchovy]

Max, I'll avoid the sludge that shows up on the comps and the narcolepsy-inducing stuff that chases away otherwise bright-eyed students for good in high school. Here's a rough list:

-- Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. Readable and fleshes out all the principals. Structure is thematic and covers all the high points (the duel, the political brokering that made Washington the capital, the Adams-Jefferson friendship, etc.) The History Channel docs several years back were strong.

-- Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founding Fathers Different. Scholarly bent but also brings these people to life.

-- Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalties and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence. More of the same, good animations, deals with a lot of the "little white guys" and not just the (Big-F)ounders.

-- Richard Brookhiser, What Would the Founders Do: Our Questions, Their Answers. Brings them to life in the now in regard to the challenges we face two centuries later.

-- Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800. Specifically addresses the fledgling nation's place as an coming global power.

-- Christopher Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels. The British side of fighting and losing the Revolution.

-- Daniel Walker Rowe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-48. Starts with the dawn of the industrial age, where a lot of the problems started, and on through the crises brought on by sectional conflict.

-- Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism. Traces the role of newspapers in the vicious politics of the time.
-- The Age of Federalism, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick. The bible of the period. An 800-page colossus, won a Bancroft Prize in 1994. Some heavy lifting required but it covers everything from the French Revolution to the distinctly Scottish vehicle of intellectualism that gave fuel to many of the ideas behind the revolution.

A few others:
-- Michael Knox Beran, Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind. The best book on the inner Jefferson.
-- Noemie Emery, Alexander Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait.
-- Gordon Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.
-- Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. Focuses principally on duelling and the honor culture.

Fiction:
-- Jeff Shaara, Rise to Rebellion. NYT bestseller. Covers 1768-1776. Very good.
-- Jeff Shaara, The Glorious Cause. NYT bestseller. 1776-81.

All it takes is one puff. I'm far gone. It's not too late for you.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

LJB --
I just finished the Wood book. I didn't find it academic at all. I thought it was a nice primer, and the Burr chapter was fascinating as hell.
I'd toss Garry Wills's Inenting/Explaining/Scotus America trilogy, and James Simon's "What Kind Of Nation?" onto the pile.

 

[Herbert Anchovy]

Of all of them, Burr would have been most comfortable in this polity. There's been a subtle but clear movement to throw him into the pot with the rest of the [F]ounders, even though Burr's the one guy they would have asked to leave the party. Maybe Paine, too.

Speaking of Paine, a great essay on the strange and macabre journey of his exhumed remains, literally scattered to the four corners.

http://craignelson.us/tompaine.html

In the 1830s, a Unitarian minister announced he was the owner of Paine's skull and right hand, but wouldn't let anyone see them; in the 1930s, a Brighton woman clamed to have the jaw. There are those who say they have buttons made of Paine; a Frenchman seems to have a rib.

On March 31, 2001, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association in association with the city of New Rochelle, New York announced a global mission: to bring back and reinter the founding father's bones. While the Huguenots marching band of New Rochelle High School played Earth, Wind and Fire and Louis Prima at the ceremony, Cablevision pledged to contribute $1,000 in the search for the historic remains. "His picture should be up there with the founding fathers," said Brian McCartin, TPNHA executive director. "Why isn't it? Because he's dangerous."

"In a way, it's poetic," Berton continued. "This is the man who said, 'The world is my country.'" After writing in Wired magazine about Paine as the spiritual father of American journalism, Jon Katz received so many emails from Europe claiming bone ownership that he concluded "by the end of the year, Thomas Paine might actually be reassembled." New Rochelle and the Paine historic society have a more realistic goal, hoping to bring home this great paradox of a founding father by the year 2009 to mark the 100th anniversary of Paine's death. "We're going to do it eventually," Berton vows. "If not in this generation, then in the next."

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

I just read two Paine bios, Hitchens' book on The Rights of Man, and his three greatest works: Common Sense, The Crisis essays, and TROM, this winter. There never has been a more important writer in America than Tom Paine. That there is no memorial is a crime and a sin.

 

[Max Mercy]

Max, I'll avoid the sludge that shows up on the comps and the narcolepsy-inducing stuff that chases away otherwise bright-eyed students for good in high school. Here's a rough list:

-- Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. Readable and fleshes out all the principals. Structure is thematic and covers all the high points (the duel, the political brokering that made Washington the capital, the Adams-Jefferson friendship, etc.) The History Channel docs several years back were strong.

I picked this one up yesterday. Looking forward to diving in after work tonight. Thanks for the recommendation!

 

[Herbert Anchovy]

Max,

You chose wisely.

No problem, it's my pleasure.

 

[Starman]

Episode No. 6 was on tonight, and the series is definitely stumbling to the finish line.

Again, the majority of the episode is Adams and other characters sitting around in offices talking.

The break of the Jefferson-Adams relationship finally comes. Adams' own sponsorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts is glossed over, as if he was talked into it by the wily Hamilton.

The entire presidency of John Adams apears to be nothing more than a PITFA for all concerned.

The alcoholism death of Charles Adams, foreshadowed in previous episodes, comes as no surprise.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Episode No. 6 was on tonight, and the series is definitely stumbling to the finish line.

Again, the majority of the episode is Adams and other characters sitting around in offices talking.

The break of the Jefferson-Adams relationship finally comes. Adams' own sponsorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts is glossed over, as if he was talked into it by the wily Hamilton.

McCullough pretty much buries it, too.

 

[zeke12]

So, I'm finally catching up on this, and one thing is completely baffling:

What's the deal with the constant 30-degree camera tilt?

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Hey, it was the 1700's.

 

[finishthehat]

So, I'm finally catching up on this, and one thing is completely baffling:

What's the deal with the constant 30-degree camera tilt?

It's an homage to the Adam West "Batman" era.

 

[Herbert Anchovy]

The alcoholism death of Charles Adams, foreshadowed in previous episodes, comes as no surprise.

There's at least some belief/assertion Charles Adams was exiled from his family because he was a sodomite.

Lyons, Clare A., "Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," William and Mary Quarterly, 2003. (Award-winning article)
http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/60.1/lyons.html

http://www.geocities.com/bobarnebeck/LEnfant.htm

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Ruh-roh!

 

[Herbert Anchovy]

You can go anywhere with these guys. So much of the field remains untilled. We still don't even really know what they thought about homosexuals, other than the term as we know and recognize it didn't even exist. The antiquified notion of Greek "man love" must certainly have been known to them from their heavy exposition to the classics, but "gay" was just not part of their language.

The casting, first, and then the scripting and characterization of Hamilton turned me away for good. There is no more misunderstood major figure in American history than this man. I'd repeat it if it would be worth a ****. And again, it it would help. Here, on film, the myth perpetualizes.

Hamilton Misunderstood has been the book angle for his biographers (a supremely talented and dichotomous bunch including political economy experts, hardline economists, constitutional law profs and romanticists) for a half century.

This miniseries, sadly, was his chance truly to penetrate, yet it doesn't. Once again Hamilton is arrayed as a lame Vader to Jefferson's/Adams' Luke.

The **** has gone on for over a century and a half.

The young people roll their eyes.

And we are all the worse for it, worse than we are already.

 

[Evil Bastard (aka Chris_L)]

If you are going to make a sci-fi analogy - I'd say that Hamilton was portrayed more like Grima Wormtongue than Darth Vader with an older Washington being his King Theoden.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Is LOTR technically sci-fi?
I ask this seriously.

 

[Evil Bastard (aka Chris_L)]

Is LOTR technically sci-fi?
I ask this seriously.

I understand why you would ask.

Let me just say that I took an English class in college on Science Fiction and LOTR made up the second half of the class assigned reading. So I'm going to say that it is science fiction. However, that sort of definition would also make Beowulf sci-fi as well and that just doesn't seem right.

 

[Starman]

Final episode tonight, suffused with the ennui of which Adams himself complains. There was really no way around this; once Adams left the White House, basically his public career was over.

Most of the episode is devoted to Adams' dithering about his place in history. The deaths of Nabby and Abigail also burn up a lot of screen time; other than that, a lot of Adams walking around the Peacefield farm and grumbling.

The split from Jefferson comes and goes; the last 20 minutes of the show basically a dialogue in their letters. A little foreshadowing of how John Quincy was going to go wrong as President; mainly, by repeating his father's mistake of retaining a disloyal cabinet.

Overall, I'd give the series about a B. It could have been way better, but it could have been way worse.

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

So, I'm finally catching up on this, and one thing is completely baffling:

What's the deal with the constant 30-degree camera tilt?

It's an homage to the Adam West "Batman" era.

This post is to good to go without a huzzah.
Huzzah,
I liked how Sally H was at Jefferson's bedside at the end.

 

[Philosopher]

I agree with Starman's analysis, but I would have given the series a B+/A-.

Yes, it could have been better, but great miniseries about U.S. history are so rare that I couldn't give it lower than a B+/A-. I enjoyed the series a whole lot and made sure I got home in time to watch it each week. Definitely worth the HBO subscription.

As a side note, I'm excited about watching "Recount" too. Looks fantastic.