Douglass Adair
Douglass Greybill Adair (March 5, 1912 – May 2, 1968)[1] was an American historian who specialized in intellectual history. He is best known for his work in researching the authorship of disputed numbers of The Federalist Papers, and his influential studies in the history and influence of republicanism in the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the era of the Enlightenment. His most famous essay, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," introduced the pursuit of fame as a new motivation for understanding the actions for the Framers.
Early life and education
Douglass Greybill Adair was born in 1912 in
Career
Adair taught at
Marriage and family
Adair married the poet Virginia Hamilton.
For an array of reasons, including depression associated with his inability to produce a full-length scholarly monograph in his field, Adair committed suicide in 1968.
Legacy and honors
- In 1974, his friends prepared a volume collecting his essays, Fame and the Founding Fathers, which Institute of Early American History and Culture, with which Adair had been associated for so long. A trio of distinguished specialists in intellectual history framed the essays collected in that volume—the volume's editor, the historian Trevor Colbourn, wrote the introduction; Caroline Robbins, a leading historian of ideas, contributed a personal memoir of her friendship and intellectual collaboration with Adair; and Robert Shalhope presented an essay situating Adair in the historiography of the Revolution and the early Republic, with special reference to republicanism and what historians called the "republican synthesis." This volume was reprinted in 1998 by Liberty Fund and remains in print today.[4]
- In 2000, Adair's dissertation was published as The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer, edited by Mark E. Yellin, with a foreword by Joyce O. Appleby.[5]
Notes
- JSTOR 1921802.
- ^ Adair, Douglass (1971). The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: Republicanism, the Class Struggle, and the Virtuous Farmer, PhD Yale University. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Colbourn, Trevor, "Introduction." In: Adair, D. Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair (New York: W. W. Norton for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1974), xiv.
- ISBN 978-0-86597-193-6.
- ISBN 978-0-7391-0125-4.