In 1867, a young man from a famous American family wanted to make a splash as a historian.

His name was Henry Brooks Adams, and in the 1800s, the Adams family was kind of a big

deal.

His father, Charles Adams, had been President Lincoln's ambassador to London.

His grandfather had been no less than John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United

States.

So needless to say, he came from some rather impressive stock, but Henry's destiny

was not to be in politics.

Instead, he was determined to make his name as an academic.

Into that end, he went looking for a sacred cow he could topple over in the name of

good history.

Once unsurprisingly, he set his eyes on the history of the American South.

The Civil War had only been over for a few years, and tensions between the North and

the South hadn't exactly cooled.

Henry Adams was a Harvard-educated Boston native whose family had worked for the Lincoln

administration.

Suffice it to say, he was pretty loyal to the Union.

Now like many Northern academics, he had no qualms about rubbing salt in the wounds

of the defeated South.

Indeed, it's been mentioned by more than one observer that the unstated goal of many

of the Boston historians of this era was to completely write the South out of America's

history, starting with early colonial times.

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