Henry+Adams



Born into the prominent Adams family of presidents and historians, Henry Adams was himself a historian and philosopher. In his autobiography, __The Education of Henry Adams__, he writes about himself with a kind of distant irony in the third person, suggesting that he is only a small part of larger forces at work in the world. It is in the chapter entitled "Failure," about his own early attempts to teach, that he wrote, "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influences stops."