Talk:John Adams

headline about John Adams

John Adams, (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was an American politician and the second President of the United States (1797–1801), after being the first Vice President (1789–1797) for two terms.

Adams came to prominence in the early stages of the American Revolution. As a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress, he played a leading role in persuading Congress to adopt the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776. As a representative of Congress in Europe, he was a major negotiator of the eventual peace treaty with Great Britain, and chiefly responsible for obtaining important loans from Amsterdam.

Adams' revolutionary credentials secured him two terms as George Washington's vice president and his own election as the second president of the United States. During his one term as president, he was frustrated by battles inside his own Federalist party (by a faction led by Alexander Hamilton) and the newly emergent bi-partisan disagreements with Jeffersonian Republicans. During his term he also signed the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts. The major accomplishment of his presidency was his peaceful resolution of the Quasi-War crisis with France in 1798.

After Adams was defeated for reelection by Thomas Jefferson (at the time, Adams' vice-president), he retired to Massachusetts. He and his wife Abigail Adams founded an accomplished family line of politicians, diplomats, and historians now referred to as the Adams political family. Adams was the father of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States. His achievements have received greater recognition in modern times, though his contributions were not initially as celebrated as those of other Founders

John Adams, (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was an American politician and the second President of the United States (1797–1801), after being the first Vice President (1789–1797) for two terms. He is regarded as one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States.

Adams came to prominence in the early stages of the American Revolution. As a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress, he played a leading role in persuading Congress to adopt the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776. As a representative of Congress in Europe, he was a major negotiator of the eventual peace treaty with Great Britain, and chiefly responsible for obtaining important loans from Amsterdam.

Adams' revolutionary credentials secured him two terms as George Washington's vice president and his own election as the second president of the United States. During his one term as president, he was frustrated by battles inside his own Federalist party (by a faction led by Alexander Hamilton) and the newly emergent bi-partisan disagreements with Jeffersonian Republicans. During his term he also signed the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts. The major accomplishment of his presidency was his peaceful resolution of the Quasi-War crisis with France in 1798.

After Adams was defeated for reelection by Thomas Jefferson (at the time, Adams' vice-president), he retired to Massachusetts. He and his wife Abigail Adams founded an accomplished family line of politicians, diplomats, and historians now referred to as the Adams political family. Adams was the father of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States. His achievements have received greater recognition in modern times, though his contributions were not initially as celebrated as those of other Founders kids remember that wikipedia is an awful site! will anderson rocks!!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.110.236.155 (talk) 21:55, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Interesting additional fact

Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson - the only two Presidents to actually sign the Declaration of Independence - died on exactly the same day. It was 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/waleshistory/2010/09/welsh_presidents_of_the_usa.html

Paid a Pair of Shoes?

The article claims that John Adams was paid 18 guineas, the value of "a pair of shoes" - this is surely a gross underestimate, and must surely mean to say 18 guineas total = (perhaps somewhat more than) the price of a pair of shoes PER SOLDIER. I sketch the boring details below.

A guinea was 1 pound 1 shilling - working with Massachusetts currency (and it's even more true if it was British currency), the article here [1] puts the exchange rate at about 1.3 Massachusetts pounds (1770) to one pound sterling (1770), which relative to British prices over time would be worth 63.90 pounds in 2005 (according to the nationalarchives.gov.uk)... or at least around there in ordinary purchasing power. The result is about a thousand pounds in today's terms... more than ten times the current price of an ordinary new pair of shoes (and the conversion was done by purchasing power, supposedly) - there were 8 soldiers, so that comes out to around the same order of magnitude PER SOLDIER. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.185.138.171 (talk) 12:04, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

The statement is sourced to a book, so if you're correct, either the book is wrong or the book doesn't support the statement. If you meticulously go through the history of the article, you should be able to find whether the part about the shoes was added along with the source or separately, which might be a clue. I don't really think the shoe comparison is very helpful for today's readers, though. Rivertorch (talk) 17:21, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

I too was taken aback by that statement. It is wholly unhelpful and misleading. It may possibly be that Adams or some other American colonist did spend 18 guineas on a pair of shoes, and they must have been expensive imports, with silver buckles and other decoration. But I doubt it. More likely that sum would fit a gentleman out with an entire wardrobe - I cannot find the price of a pair of quality shoes at that period but a suit of clothing for a respectable man seems to have been less than five guineas. I have checked various sources on comparative purchasing power and the Bank of England calculator gives a value of £2681 at 2010 prices, or around US$4000. I am sure that it would be possible to find an American who has paid that much for shoes today, but we would hardly take that as a useful indication of the value of money. Just because a source is given, if it is plainly wrong or unhelpful we should not use it. It just gives WP a bad name.--AJHingston (talk) 01:23, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Jefferson Survives

It would be good to note that Adams's last reported words about Thomas Jefferson were not in fact accurate: Jefferson had died a few hours before. This is one of the more memorable bits of history about Adams. Phenylphenol (talk) 16:18, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Religious views: two issues

The article cites two Ph.D. dissertations—footnotes 108 and 109/109 (the second one twice)—and quotes their authors without explaining who they are or why they should be considered authorities on the subject. I question the reliability<relative reliability of those sources and am tagging them.

I also question the recent edit that served to downplay Adams's Unitarian affiliation, relegating it to the second paragraph where it's described as the argument of one writer—a possible violation of WP:DUE, given that a large number of mainstream reference and academic sources, including this one (used to source Religious affiliations of Presidents of the United States), list Adams as Unitarian.

Thought I'd bring this up here before being bold because I haven't been paying close attention to the article and am not an expert on Adams or early American history. Rivertorch (talk) 07:46, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

WP rules (WP:RS explictly include finished PhD dissertations as reliable sources. ("Completed dissertations or theses written as part of the requirements for a PhD, and which are publicly available, are considered publications by scholars and are routinely cited in footnotes. They have been vetted by the scholarly community....") Is there some reason to challenge their validity? To do so violated the wp:BLP rule concerning disparaging remarks about a living person. (It is highly damaging to a scholar's career to disparage his PhD dissertation). Rjensen (talk) 08:01, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

That's a novel reading of WP:BLP, as far as I can tell. I disparaged no one's dissertation, and it is hardly a violation of policy to place a tag reading ^{[unreliable source?]} in an article. The tag asks a question (note its question mark), which you have answered. Thank you for your answer. What you might have added was that you personally added the wording to the guideline WP:RS. Since your addition has faced neither reversion nor serious challenge in two years, it is now an established part of WP:RS—a change I should have noticed. Mea culpa. In any event, I think the section is a bit of a mess. Part of its problem is that it fails to make clear (at least without a close reading of the footnotes) who claimed what about Adams, when they claimed it, and with what credentials; recent claims from Pulitzer-winning biographers rub shoulders with those from newly-minted Ph.D.s and pre-WWII scholarship. That two sources meet WP:RS doesn't make them equally reliable, after all, and it occurs to me that particular care should be taken to ensure that content related to topics which spark significant controversy in popular discourse be especially well-sourced and presented with due weight.

Do you—or perhaps someone else—have an opinion on my question re Unitarianism? Rivertorch (talk) 09:44, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Challenging a dissertation as an unreliable source is disparaging a scholar. "Has he stopped beating his wife?" is the same sort of pseudo "question" but it is clearly a negative commentary on a living person (and that is tightly restricted). As for the quality of the sources, an editor really ought to read them before making a challenge. Religion and theology are technical issues of the sort better analyzed in depth by 300 page PhD dissertations at leading universities than in a paragraph in a popular book.Rjensen (talk) 10:07, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Oh dear. A question isn't the same thing as a comment, a contextual challenge to a sourced sentence isn't an impugnment of the source, and a maintenance tag placed due to a good-faith concern and in ignorance of a change in guideline wording isn't a policy violation. And the "beating his wife" thing is an entirely false analogy, as a moment's careful thought surely would reveal. Regarding what you say about religion and theology, I might agree with what you say when I consider your words at face value, but they seem to carry (based on your imaginative use of the word) a faint whiff of disparagement of one of the article's sources. Perhaps the guideline should deprecate scholars who write "popular" books instead of "300 page [sic] PhD dissertations"? ;) Come on. If you really think editors should read a doctoral dissertation before daring to sully its purity with a tags, there's a better place to propose that. I doubt it will gain traction, but my prescience has been on the wane around here just lately. (If you piggyback it on a resolution endorsing BLP-violation witch-hunts, you'll undoubtedly get quite a few 'support' !votes.) Rivertorch (talk) 11:26, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

As to Adams' religion. Most scholars say he was a Congregationalist of the Unitarian faction (they had not separated yet). That is not controversial. What is more interesting: was he a deist as well? I think the consensus of serious scholarship is that he used Deist terms (like "providence") but rejected the usual Deist notion that God did not intervene in human affairs. The paragraph makes this point--all the scholars cited are in agreement. Occasionally you find popular sources that include Adams in a list of deists, with no analysis. Thus Self (2009) says: "The claim will be made that George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, as well as many others, were all deists." But that's superficial. Rjensen (talk) 10:22, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Genuinely interesting, but it doesn't begin to address my concern. Rivertorch (talk)

What is this nonsense about questioning the reliability of a dissertation counts as violation of WP:BLP? You are utterly incorrect. We are allowed to challenge the reliability of any source and Rivertorch raised a valid question that, as far as I can see, you have yet to answer. Just because someone wrote a dissertation on a subject does not mean that they count as an authority on the subject. A paper written by someone who is distinctly an authority in the relations of religion and theology would be far more reliable than this PhD dissertation. The whole question is, are these authors qualified writers on the subject of religion and theology? Have they been published in the field before and are considered an authority within the field in general? If they are just some random person who wrote their PhD dissertation on the subject, they would most certainly have questionable reliability. Silverseren^C 10:48, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

the Wiki rules on BLP are very strict-- they require for example very good sourcing for disparaging statements, and no sourcing whatsoever was provided here. Wiki RS rules also explicitly state that PhD dissertations are valid RS, and Rivertorch, without looking at the two dissertations, assumed all dissertations are invalid sources. He since realizes his mistake. You get to be an authority on theology by writing a PhD dissertation that is accepted by the faculty of a leading PhD school, as was the case here. It means that multiple serious scholars have approved your work. Note that the article itself has no conflicts--all the authorities are in broad agreement and Rivertorch failed to find any RS that disagrees with the multiple scholars cited there. Note that Philip Goff wrote one of the dissertations--he is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs at Indiana U-Indianapolis,the Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture (a prominent national center for religious studies) and Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies. He has published widely and is a leading scholar. The other one, Gregg L. Frazer, is a full professor now and has published his work with a leading university press: The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution (University Press of Kansas, to appear May 2012). Mark Noll, a famous scholar, says the book is "Sophisticated, well-documented, and forcefully argued....readers should come away much better informed about the past and also much better situated to adjudicate religious-political debates today." To my knowledge no one has challenged their scholarship. Rjensen (talk) 21:04, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

See, that info is all we needed to know that they are reliable and you could have said that in the first place. Though you are still utterly, utterly wrong about BLP policy. For disparaging statements within an article text, they have to be really well sourced. This has absolutely nothing to do with questioning the reliability with sources and I am absolutely horrified that someone with 50,000 edits actually thinks that, because it is so very wrong. Silverseren^C 22:08, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Furthermore, please stop putting words in other people's mouths. Rivertorch never said that all PhD dissertations are unreliable, he said that there was no indication that the authors of these two dissertations are authorities on the subject they are commenting on. Silverseren^C 22:10, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

If Wiki said "athlete XYZ" set the record in 2003, and an editor adds, "did he use steroids?", with zero evidence of steroid use, that's a disparaging comment about XYZ even though phrased as a question. It' a violation of BLP. To ask whether a person's PhD dissertation is a "unreliable source" is exactly the same. Rjensen (talk) 23:42, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

It is not whatsoever. We are allowed to question the reliability of any source that we use in the encyclopedia. THat's the whole point of the unreliable source tag in the first place. Silverseren^C 00:33, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

BLP discussion. Silverseren^C 01:10, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

the very strict wp:BLP rules trump all other guidelines. Rjensen (talk) 02:35, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Except you're using BLP wrong. Very, very wrong. Silverseren^C 06:48, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

I read the BLP as a VERY strong rule--one that over-rides anything else. It says that if Wiki text is in any way derogatory regarding a living person it needs STRONG proof or should be immediately erased. Challenging a a person's PhD thesis as unreliable is highly derogatory in the academic world, which depends heavily on the PhD to validate candidates for jobs. Wiki's rule stresses: Material that may adversely affect a person's reputation should be treated with special care Rjensen (talk) 07:43, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

That's not how it works. There is a difference between article text and...well, everything else, and you seem to be conflating the two. That sentence you quoted is referring to text within an article about a subject. It refers to making sure that you have strong sourcing for any negative statements about a living person and to make sure the negative statements are being used with the due weight required for the amount of sources on the specific criticism. This, however, has nothing to do with article text or a BLP in an article. This has to do with questioning whether a specific source used in an article is high enough quality of sourcing to be proper for the information it is being used to source. We question sources all the time. Your explanations about the author's above is enough info to show that they are experts in the field and reliable for the information they are commenting on. However, questioning whether they were experts, since we didn't know before who they were, and therefore questioning the quality of their dissertations as a source does not violate BLP whatsoever. This is the point that you need to understand, the difference between the BLP policy and questioning reliability. Questioning the reliability of a source is never going to violate BLP. Silverseren^C 08:39, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

I argue that when you use Wikipedia to damage a person's reputation that violates the BLP rules. The rule says that the violation can occur anywhere. It says Material that may adversely affect a person's reputation should be treated with special care. It does not allow loopholes. In this case, there was no special care whatever--instead very careless use of tags that 30 seconds of googling the names would show was false. Rjensen (talk) 09:44, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

• Will this argument ever shut up...ok. 74.34.84.94 (talk) 21:37, 20 February 2012

disentanglment or disentanglement

Under the section "Presidency: 1797–1801" we can find the next sentence: The Quasi-War with France resulted in the disentanglment... wouldn't it be better disentanglement? As it's blocked I can correct it myself. ondo segi! Drpolilla 194.30.80.82 (talk) 16:29, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Y Done - thanks for spotting the typo.--JayJasper (talk) 18:10, 27 February 2012 (UTC)