ABSTRACT
The image of Edward Gibbon on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria di Ara Coeli, musing amidst crumbling columns about the meaning of the fall of Rome, obsessed Henry Adams. In the Education of Henry Adams, a book that Henry Adams composed in 1905, fifteen years after he had finished his History, he revealed that, during the summer of 1860, he had more than once sat on the very spot where Gibbon had sat some hundred years before. The History’s ironic interpretation of American politics served to rationalize Adams’s own political failures. The psychological dimension of the historical interpretation of Adams’s writings also deepened the understanding of numerous passages in the History. As early as 1871, Adams had begun to contrast impersonal, rational, and masculine forms of life with personal, emotional, and feminine ones.
