The Henry Adams Society

News and Correspondence

On this page the Henry Adams Society provides a forum for news, views, notes, and queries concerning Henry Adams scholarship. Our policy is to reprint without editorial intervention.

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Edward Chalfant on the web

Edward Chalfant now has a website of his own: www.edwardchalfant.com.

Anyone who would like to purchase volumes of his trilogy may do so by going to his website or by sending an email to chalfanted@aol.com.

Henry Adams and the Need to Know

Henry Adams and the Need to Know , edited by William Merrill Decker and Earl N. Harbert, is scheduled for publication in August 2005. Published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the volume is distributed by the University of Virginia Press.

The alleged photo of HA published by Oxford U Press: a letter from Edward Chalfant

On Sept 6, 2003, at Ojai, California, Edward Chalfant & his wife Mariana showed to George S. Stuart, an established authority on "historical figures" and their clothing, the alleged photograph of Henry Adams that appears on the cover of the Oxford University Press paperback reprint of The Education of Henry Adams. (See Oxford World's Classics, 1999).
     They asked Mr. Stuart to estimate the date of the clothes worn by the man in the photograph. He quickly replied that the technology of the photograph is clearly "turn of the century" -- i.e. circa 1900. He said also the clothes belong to the same historical time.
     The man in the Oxford photograph is obviously in the prime of life, can be assumed to be in his thirties, is clean-shaven, and somewhat balding. If the photograph dates from c. 1900, his date of birth can be placed in the 1860s. But Adams was born in 1838 and by 1900 was an aging man of 62, bearded, and VERY bald.
     When shown the Oxford photograph side by side with the photograph of Adams made at Harvard in 1858 when he was twenty, Mr. Stuart said at once that they are photographs of different persons.
     Stuart is famous for creating one-quarter life-size, three-dimensional portraits of historical figures that show their heads and features with scrupulous accuracy. He at once cited a list of differences between the two photographed heads & features.
     On all the above-stated bases, Stuart affirmed that Oxford's alleged photo of Henry Adams is ''very probably'' an error.
     When a renowned authority on historical figures says that the alleged photograph of Adams is ''very probably'' not one of him, an alarm should be sounded that is loud and urgent enough to set an inquiry in motion.
     As one of Adams's biographers, I urge all persons interested in Adams to join in a serious effort to settle, by every means that we can think of, whether the Oxford picture is, or is not, a photograph of Adams.
     I suggest too that all of us conduct our inquiry with the help of this website.
     Differences of opinion may emerge between us. Assuming they do, let's try to arrive in time at an agreed joint opinion based on cooperative reasoning and all of our assembled evidence.

Edward & Mariana Chalfant