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He wrote The History of the United States of America 1801 – 1817 LinkHe also wrote some novels both fiction and non-fiction. Pretty much all I know about him is he seems to lean anti-capitalist (as were most authors of that period), but I just read a couple of chapters from The Education of Henry Adams and I didn't really see it.I'm just curious what he's considered, according to academic standards, as a historian.
I did some research and it seems that he mostly kept to American history and attempted to formulate a scientific theory of history. Not sure what to think of him. My opinion is that attempting to make history scientific is tilting at windmills. Historical study can and has for the most art been rationalized but I do not think it could be considered scientific. the human element of history will always make events chaotic and thus make formulating a scientific ratuionalization of history itself frutiless, there will always be specualtion as to motives and causation I think.
I'm not sure here, but I don't think he was trying to make history scientific per se, he was just using the scientific theory/empirical evidence method of studying it. I don't know if that's the wrong way or not. I would question if “hypothesis” is or should be used in history. Copuldn't that lead to a lot of problems? Maybe I'm wrong here, but there's no hypothesis in history, it just is what it is. History's not trying to prove anything, it's just showing facts. Right?
Lots of folks have tried to use history to prove something. Karl Marx springs immediately to mind as someone who tried to use history scientifically to prove something. I am not talking politics, he actually thought he could prove that history was moving in a specific direction and attempted to prophesy the future from the past. Michel Foucault tried the same thing with his epistemic theory of history.
