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    Abigail Adams
    Abigail Adams
    Abigail Adams
    Audiobook19 hours

    Abigail Adams

    Written by Woody Holton

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

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    About this audiobook

    Abigail Adams offers a fresh perspective on the famous events of Adams's life, and along the way, Woody Holton, a renowned historian of the American Revolution, takes on numerous myths about the men and women of the founding era. But the book also demonstrates that domestic dramas-from unplanned pregnancies to untimely deaths-could be just as heartbreaking, significant, and inspiring as the actions of statesmen and soldiers. A special focus of the book is Adams's complex relationships: with her mother, sisters, and children; with her husband's famous contemporaries; and with Phoebe, one of her father's slaves. At the same time that John exhibited his own diplomatic skills on a better-known canvas, Abigail struggled to prevent the charitable gifts she gave her sisters from coming between them. In a departure from the persistently upbeat tone of most Adams biographies, Holton's work shows how frequently her life was marred by tragedy, making this the deepest, most humanistic portrayal ever published. Using the matchless trove of Adams family manuscripts, the author steps back to allow Abigail to respond to her many losses in her own words.

    Holton reveals that Abigail Adams sharply disagreed with her husband's financial decisions and assumed control of the family's money herself-earning them a tidy fortune through her shrewd speculations (this during a time when married women were not permitted to own property). And he shows that her commitment to women's equality and education was intense and explicitly expressed and practical, from the more than two thousand letters she wrote over her lifetime to her final will (written in defiance of legislation prohibiting married women from bequeathing property).

    Alternately witty, poignant, and uplifting, Holton's narrative sheds new light on one of America's best-loved but least-understood icons.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 23, 2009
    ISBN9781400184217
    Author

    Woody Holton

    Woody Holton is an associate professor of history at the University of Richmond and the author of the award-winning book Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia.

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    • 5/5
      Loved this book, and read it immediately after David McCullough’s John Adams. It works beautifully as a companion piece. Celebratory, unvarnished, thorough, YET still enormously entertaining biography of a seminal ardent feminist who strived to overturn traditional gender roles in revolutionary America and well into the 19th century. Her “remember the ladies” entreaty is well known, but Holton‘s real magic is unpacking Abigail Adams’s factually supported financial wizardry in an era when women had virtually no legal claims to assets or property. Thomas Jefferson died more than $100,000 in debt. Largely because of the investment savvy and business acumen of Abigail Adams, when John Adams finally passed away after her, their estate was valued at more than $100,000. Why? When John was envoy to European countries or in Philadelphia designing the new country, Abigail was in Massachusetts managing the home, managing the farm, supporting a network of friends and relatives in need, and raising an extended family of children, grandchildren, and others. She was also progressive and unusually generous in some of her interactions with enslaved and free Black people in her orbit, despite a clear politically conservative streak.

      Highly recommend!
    • 4/5
      A fascinating look at Abigail Adams. Most of us know about her “Remember the Ladies” appeal to her husband. This bio also shows her financial astuteness in spite of women having little legal power in that arena. She often advised other women (especially her sisters) on how to be financially stable after marriage and preparation for their possible widowhood — this was at a time when men generally had financial control but for some loopholes. Abigail Adams was definitely a woman ahead of her times.
    • 5/5
      I have been fascinated with Abigail Adams for years and really enjoyed this book. One thing about reading it on the Kindle is it seemed to take forever to read! I would read and see that I had only read 2% of the book. I was nearing 62% and was reading about her death and wondered what the rest of the 40% was going to be about when the book ended. The last 38% was footnotes, acknowledgements, sources and so forth. I clicked through all of them so my book would show 100%, otherwise, in a few months I would see that I had only read 62% of the book and wonder why I hadn't finished it!
    • 5/5
      I'm acknowledged in this book, so I can't really "review" it as such; consider this a hearty recommendation. It's one of the best biographies I've ever had the privilege to read, being at once pleasantly readable and also carefully researched. It breaks much new ground in pointing out the important role Abigail's financial prowess played in creating the family's fiscal stability: "it may be that if [John Adams'] financial records had survived the ravages of time as well as his correspondence did," Holton writes on p. 277, "they would show his wife making a larger contribution to the family's wealth than he did." A remarkable statement, perhaps, but not if you know Abigail as Holton reveals her.Absolutely one of the top biographies of 2009, by far.