Henry Adams, Virgin and the Dynamo

The Education of the Henry Adams reviews Adams’s and the United States’s education and growth during the 19th century. Adams was an old man who had Puritan beliefs about sex and religion. In this autobiography, Adams voices his skepticism about man’s newfound power to control the direction of history, in particular, the exploding world of science and technology, where all certainties of the future have vanished (anb.org, 1). Adams grew up in …showed first 75 words of 422 total…

…showed last 75 words of 422 total…the future, of infinity (Adams, 380). “He began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as early Christians felt the cross” (Adams, 380). Like the changes in art and sexuality, the technology was overtaking religion. The dynamo, to Adams, has become a symbol of the unknown, of the future without God and religion. This was Adams’s greatest uncertainty; going against all of his past and beliefs and moving on into the unpredictable future.