Michael O'Brien

"Thinking about the South, says Michael O'Brien, was "part of being an Adams." In this book O'Brien shows how Henry Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams) looked at the region during various phases of his life. O'Brien explores the cultural and familial impulses behind those views and locates them in American intellectual history. He begins with the young Henry Adams, who served as his father's secretary in the House of Representatives during the secession crises of 1860-1861 and in the American embassy in London during and after the Civil War, until 1868. O'Brien then covers a number of topics relevant to Adams's outlook on the South."--BOOK JACKET.

In this magisterial history of intellectual life, Michael O'Brien analyzes the lives and works of antebellum Southern thinkers and reintegrates the South into the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history. O'Brien finds that the evolution of Southern intellectual life paralleled and modified developments across the Atlantic by moving from a late Enlightenment sensibility to Romanticism and, lastly, to an early form of realism. Volume 1 describes the social underpinnings of the Southern intellect by examining patterns of travel and migration; the formation of ideas on race, gender, ethnicity, locality, and class; and the structures of discourse, expressed in manuscripts and print culture. In Volume 2, O'Brien looks at the genres that became characteristic of Southern thought. Throughout, he pays careful attention to the many individuals who fashioned the Southern mind, including John C. Calhoun, Louisa McCord, James Henley Thornwell, and George Fitzhugh. Placing the South in the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history while recovering the contributions of numerous influential thinkers and writers, O'Brien's masterwork demonstrates the sophistication and complexity of Southern intellectual life before 1860.

Stories about food and death arranged into three categories: spécialités de la maison: stories by some famous authors; entrées historiques: tales from the culinary past; and just desserts: a selection of detective cases.

Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a Russian carriage and set out to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France then experiencing Napoleon's return from Elba. Along the way, she learned what Napoleon's wars had done to Europe, what her old friends in the royal court in Berlin had experienced during the French occupation, how it felt to have her life threatened by reckless soldiers, and how to manage fear. Historian Michael O'Brien reconstructs for the first time that extraordinary passage. This evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and kings offers a moving portrait of a lady, her difficult marriage, and her conflicted sense of what it meant to be a woman caught between worlds.--From publisher description. The prize-winning historian O'Brien reconstructs Louisa Adams's extraordinary passage through Europe in 1815, providing both an evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and a moving portrait of her difficult marriage to John Quincy Adams.