• John Adams and the Constructions of History
• Carla J. Mulford (bio)

John Adams was among the most learned and most mercurial of those who took up the challenge of rebelling against Great Britain, creating a constitution, and serving in administration of the new government. While Adams has received some scholarly attention across the years, he tends to be less frequently studied than his peers.¹ James Muldoon points out that Adams, the "least studied of the founding fathers," ought to be studied for his political thought, because "it is in his political writings that his historical approach to political development extensively developed" (p. 32). Instead, in recent years, Adams has been studied for his relationship to his family, particularly to Abigail Adams, and his personality rather than for his prodigious legal mind and his writings on history. Richard Bernstein agrees: "Adams lived with books at his elbow and a pen in his hand" (p. 2). That Adams spent his life both learning and teaching—this is what Bernstein conceives as "the education of John Adams" (p. 2).

To a scholar who studies the well-read and genial autodidact, Benjamin Franklin, the study of John Adams would be difficult. Both Muldoon and Bernstein acknowledge the difficulty and attend to the deep nuances of their subject's character and intellectual life. Muldoon writes that Adams, "quite proud of his learning," was "famously ambitious, touchy, sensitive to slights, and, eventually quite concerned that the country that emerged out of the Revolution was not what he anticipated" (p. xiii). Bernstein repeatedly shows us how Adams, the "thinking politician" (p. 12), was also at key moments in his life irritable, sanctimonious, self-centered, anxious about fame, and out of touch with his American colleagues in Congress on his return from diplomatic duties in Europe. Bernstein shows Adams's envy of George Washington's [End Page 232] commanding presence, framing the differences between the two as a difference between cultivated self-control (Washington) and its absence (Adams). Bernstein writes, "Adams knew that his own volcanic temperament was set on hairtrigger; unlike Washington, he had not perfected the ability to keep himself in check" (p. 180). Adams's "turbulent emotions" were ever near the surface of most of his interactions (p. 180). Muldoon and Bernstein thus faced a difficult task: how to focus on the intellectual life—the deep intellectual life—of such a compelling yet exasperating (and exasperated) intellectual and political leader. Both books study Adams's significant legal, intellectual, and political contributions to American colonial and early republican life. They make sense of Adams's political thought, with Muldoon focusing on Adams's pre-revolution writings and Bernstein, on those writings, too, but more capaciously on Adams's long life.

James Muldoon's erudite, carefully argued John Adams and the Constitutional History of the Medieval British Empire—a treatise on Adams, on what colonial Americans knew about medievalism, and on Tory versus Whig representations of history—is based on the premise that "Adams's writings, poorly organized and developed as they were, contained a history of the development of the British Empire from the twelfth century to the eighteenth" (p. xiii). Muldoon, a historian of the medieval era, has identified what he calls an "underlying medieval infrastructure" that lies behind eighteenth-century American political thought. The argument centers on Adams's pre-revolutionary writings, the Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law (1765) and the Novanglus essays (1775). In Chapters 2 and 3, Muldoon offers keen insight into Adams's historical perspective on the medieval era by looking at "how he used the image of the canon and the feudal laws as the framework for understanding the political crisis of the British Empire resulting from the Stamp Act of 1765" (p. 36). Muldoon then pursues across four additional chapters, by far the larger part of the book, Adams's...

• 约翰亚当斯和历史的建构
• Carla J. Mulford（生物）

约翰·亚当斯是那些接受反抗英国、制定宪法和管理新政府的挑战的人中最博学、最善变的人之一。尽管多年来亚当斯受到了一些学术界的关注，但与同龄人相比，他的研究频率往往较低。¹詹姆斯·马尔登指出，亚当斯是“开国元勋中研究最少的人”，应该研究他的政治思想，因为“正是在他的政治著作中，他对政治发展的历史方法得到了广泛的发展”（第 32 页）。相反，近年来，人们一直在研究亚当斯与家人的关系，尤其是与阿比盖尔·亚当斯的关系，以及他的个性，而不是他惊人的法律头脑和他的历史著作。理查德·伯恩斯坦 (Richard Bernstein) 表示同意：“亚当斯手肘拿着书，手里拿着笔”（第 2 页）。亚当斯一生都在学习和教学——这就是伯恩斯坦所设想的“约翰亚当斯的教育”（第 2 页）。

对于研究博学多才的自学者本杰明·富兰克林的学者来说，研究约翰·亚当斯会很困难。Muldoon 和 Bernstein 都承认困难并关注他们主题的性格和知识生活的深刻细微差别。马尔登写道，亚当斯“为自己的学识感到非常自豪”，“以雄心勃勃、敏感、敏感，最终非常担心革命后出现的国家不是他所期望的”（第十三页）。伯恩斯坦反复向我们展示了亚当斯这位“有思想的政治家”（第 12 页）在他生命中的关键时刻也是如何易怒、道貌岸然、以自我为中心、对名誉感到焦虑，并且在他的国会中与他的美国同事脱节从欧洲执行外交任务返回。伯恩斯坦展示了亚当斯的[第232页结束]指挥存在，将两者之间的差异框定为培养的自我控制（华盛顿）与其缺席（亚当斯）之间的差异。伯恩斯坦写道，“亚当斯知道他自己的火山气质是一触即发的；与华盛顿不同，他没有完善自我控制的能力”（第 180 页）。亚当斯的“动荡情绪”在他的大部分互动中都表现得接近表面（第 180 页）。因此，马尔登和伯恩斯坦面临着一项艰巨的任务：如何关注这样一位引人注目但令人恼火（和愤怒）的知识分子和政治领袖的知识分子生活——深刻的知识分子生活。这两本书都研究了亚当斯对美国殖民和早期共和生活的重要法律、知识和政治贡献。他们理解亚当斯的政治思想，

詹姆斯·马尔登博学多才、仔细论证了约翰·亚当斯和中世纪大英帝国的宪法史——一篇关于亚当斯、殖民地美国人对中世纪主义的了解以及托利党与辉格党的历史表述的论文——基于这样一个前提：“亚当斯的著作，组织和发展不善，包含了大英帝国从 12 世纪到 18 世纪的发展历史”（第 xiii 页）。中世纪时代的历史学家马尔登已经确定了他所谓的“中世纪基础设施”，它隐藏在 18 世纪美国政治思想的背后。争论的中心是亚当斯的革命前著作、关于教规和封建法律的论文(1765) 和诺瓦格勒斯论文（1775）。在第 2 章和第 3 章中，马尔登通过研究“他如何使用教规和封建法律的形象作为理解大英帝国因邮票而引发的政治危机的框架”，对亚当斯对中世纪时代的历史观点提供了敏锐的洞察力。 1765 年法案”（第 36 页）。马尔登接着又写了四章，到目前为止，本书的大部分内容是亚当斯的……