Two Online Discussions of John Adams

Here are a couple of online events focusing on John Adams folks might be interested in.

On Thursday, 24 August, the hosts of the History Camp discussions will talk about Remembering John Adams: The Second President in History, Memory and Popular Culture with author Marianne Holdzkom.

The copy for the book says, “The second president is one-dimensional at times, and perhaps best known to the public as ‘obnoxious and disliked,’ but he is always fascinating.” That phrase comes from the musical 1776, which gives Adams the central role. It doesn’t come from any of Adams’s contemporaries writing about him. Indeed, the closest antecedents are in memories Adams himself wrote about how his political opponents viewed him, and he tended to puff up the severity of the opposition he faced.

According to reviews like this one, Holdzkom considers how Adams appears in his descendants’ writings, in more recent historians’ books, in the two big Broadway musicals and the H.B.O. miniseries, and even in Ezra Pound’s Eleven New Cantos.

This discussion will become available through the History Camp website and allied pages at 8:00 P.M.

On Tuesday, 29 August, the American Revolution Institute will share an online lecture by Prof. Jeanne E. Abrams of the University of Denver based on her book A View from Abroad: The Story of John Adams and Abigail Adams in Europe.

The Adamses spent a few years together in Europe in the 1780s during his diplomatic work. Abrams will discuss how in this time “the Adamses and their American contemporaries set about supplanting their British origins with a new American identity.”

That event is scheduled to take place from 6:30 to 8:30 P.M., leaving ample time for questions. Sign up through this page.