Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
The Mystery of the Missing Masterpiece

PART ONE: America in 1800
Physical and Economical Conditions
Popular Characteristics
Intellect of New England
Intellect of the Middle States
Intellect of the Southern States
American Ideals

PART TWO: America in 1817
Economical Results
Religious and Political Thought
Literature and Art
American Character

About the Author

Henry Adams (1838-1918) was an American historian, journalist, and novelist. In 1907 he published his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, considered by many to be the most important nonfiction work of the twentieth century. He died in 1918 at his home in Washington, D.C. Garry Wills was born in Atlanta, Georgia. One of our most distinguished historians and critics, he is the author of numerous books, including Saint Augustine, Papal Sin, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg. He has won many other awards, among them two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities. He is currently Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, he lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Reviews

"In his History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, first published in 1889 and completed three years later by his History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Monroe, Adams drew on this mix of disillusioned lucidity and cautious hopefulness to show just how America became America. Although often invoked, the "History," is less often read. That is a great pity. Adams's work is a masterpiece, the closest thing to an American epic we possess...readers daunted by its bulk may prefer to begin with The Jeffersonian Transformation: Passages from the History, edited and introduced by Garry Wills." --The New York Sun

"New York Review Books Classics has published an excellent abridgment of Henry Adams' nine-volume "History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison" as The Jeffersonian Transformation. Garry Wills contributes an introduction, but whoever labored to produce the abridgment is uncredited. No matter. The word "magisterial" is tossed around whenever anybody writes a ponderous tome with any claim to definitive status. But Adams' book truly deserves the term, both for his grasp of the overall, and his prose, which has a gorgeous rolling cadence." --Austin American-Statesman