ABSTRACT
In the year 1858, in the month of September, Henry Adams, twenty years old, went on board the steamer Persia in New York harbor. He was on the way to Europe as one of a group of recent Harvard graduates. They were going abroad before settling down to what seemed a sure fate, an undisturbed, well regulated life of marriage and work in an unchanging New England. The America of their parents—not theirs as yet, for they had not yet asserted themselves as citizens, hardly as persons—seemed to have taken a shape it might hold for decades: that of a deeply troubled, deeply split nation, controlled inexorably by its Southern half. By early November Henry had found a room for himself in a dull and inexpensive section of Berlin. He paid, first, $16.50 a month; then $10.00, for a second room to which he moved for economy.
