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  • Published: 22 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781598538083
  • Imprint: Library of America
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 832
  • RRP: $95.00
Categories:

John Quincy Adams: Speeches & Writings (LOA #390)





21 essential works trace a great statesman’s lifelong engagement with the promise of America and the legacy of the Founding Fathers

“Few presidents ever thought about words as carefully as John Quincy Adams. Thankfully, we can now hear his words again, in this instantly essential volume.”—Ted Widmer, historian and former presidential speechwriter

21 essential works trace a great statesman’s lifelong engagement with the promise of America and the legacy of the Founding Fathers

“Few presidents ever thought about words as carefully as John Quincy Adams. Thankfully, we can now hear his words again, in this instantly essential volume.”—Ted Widmer, historian and former presidential speechwriter

John Quincy Adams was one of the most accomplished American statesmen of his or any era. He brought all his eloquence, erudition, and fierce energy to bear on the politics of the nation over the course of a remarkable career that spanned from the founding era to the sectional crisis that preceded the Civil War.

Despite a persistent interest in this pivotal figure, there has never been a single-volume collection of Adams’s essential political writings, until now. Here, for the first time in an edition for general readers and students alike, are the profound insights of a far-seeing political leader who was also a consummate American stylist. 

From his prophetic college commencement address in 1787 to his vigorous denunciation of slavery in 1843, this Library of America volume offers a compact and compelling record of America's fractious evolution as a democratic republic, presenting some of the most important political writings in our history.

These writings are more urgently needed than ever. In the words of biographer Fred Kaplan: “His values, his definition of leadership, and his vision for the nation’s future—particularly the difficulty of transforming vision into reality in a country that often appears ungovernable—are as much about twenty-first century America as about Adams’ life and times.”

  • Published: 22 April 2025
  • ISBN: 9781598538083
  • Imprint: Library of America
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 832
  • RRP: $95.00
Categories:

Praise for John Quincy Adams: Speeches & Writings (LOA #390)

“Drawn from period newspapers, pamphlets, and original manuscripts,  this collection reminds us that Adams was not only a lawyer, a diplomat, a senator, a secretary of state, an American president—and the man who had one of the most consequential and important post-presidencies in our history—he was a distinguished writer, who cared profoundly about the budding nation and its moral stature, so deeply and tragically compromised by slavery, which he came to loathe. A tonic for our, or any, time.”
—Brenda Wineapple, author of The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation

“Perhaps the nation’s greatest statesman, John Quincy Adams was certainly its most wide-ranging and most literary. We are deeply indebted to the Library of America for this superb volume of his essential speeches and writings.” 
—Gordon S. Wood, author of Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789–1815

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