Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams

Quincy, Josiah, 1772-1864Project Gutenberg · United StatesMar 2023

Rating 3.7
Word count
714K words
Chapters
72

Tags

Motivation and Growth Historical ReappraisalAmerican PoliticsLife ChoicesPolitical CareerPolitical FigurePower GameGroup BiographyPatriotismSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. by Josiah QuincyAuthor: Quincy, Josiah, 1772-1864,Language: English, Class: E300: History: America: Revolution to the Civil War (1783-1861), Release Date: Jan 2, 2007

Editor's review

This book is Josiah Quincy's biographical memoir of John Quincy Adams. Quincy and Adams belonged to the same era and shared close intersections in public life, so the biography carries the warmth and detail of an eyewitness perspective rather than the distant overview of a later researcher. The book centers on Adams's diplomatic career, political positions, and public character, presenting the operating logic of an early American political figure across the decades following the nation's founding. For Chinese readers, its value lies in offering a primary text for understanding early American political culture and the way public figures were evaluated; the language is nineteenth-century English, with long sentences and formal diction, requiring some patience in reading. If you are interested in the period from the American Revolution to the eve of the Civil War, or in the classical approach to political biography, this book is worth reading. It is more a document of its era than a popular narrative, and is best approached in a spirit of study rather than casual entertainment.

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Reading tips

  1. First learn the basic facts of John Quincy Adams's life, then enter the main text; the relationships will be clearer
  2. Read chapter by chapter, briefly reviewing the timeline and key events after each chapter
  3. When encountering long nineteenth-century English sentences, grasp the main structure first rather than struggling over every word
  4. Read alongside materials on early American diplomatic history to deepen understanding

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
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  11. 11
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  18. 18
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  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72

FAQ

What is the relationship between the author and the subject of this book? The author, Josiah Quincy (1772–1864), belonged to the same era as the subject, John Quincy Adams, and the two intersected in public life. The book therefore carries an eyewitness perspective and preserves many observations and judgments of contemporaries.
Is this book suitable for beginning history readers? Not very suitable for complete beginners. The book is dense with figures and events, the language is nineteenth-century English, and modern annotation is lacking. Reading will be much smoother if one first has a basic framework of American history from the founding to the eve of the Civil War.
Does the electronic edition include annotations or an introduction? This edition is released by Project Gutenberg as a public-domain electronic text and typically provides only the original text, without modern annotations, introductions, or scholarly indexes. Readers who need background material should prepare relevant reference works themselves.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Quincy, Josiah, 1772-1864 Author · American · 1772–1864

Josiah Quincy (1772–1864) was an American statesman and educator who served as mayor of Boston and president of Harvard University, and who also wrote historical works. Publicly available information about him in Chinese is limited, and existing accounts focus mainly on his public roles and writings. The library holds one work by him, the Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. Written as a biography, it recounts the life and public career of this American political figure, combining documentary value with narrative quality and reflecting the author's familiarity with, and careful approach to, the life of a political figure. Because source material is limited, details of his early life and academic training are not addressed here.