Professor David Waldstreicher in The Wall Street Journal

John Quincy Adams on Paper

The Wall Street Journal, 7.28.17

He also kept a diary, with a juvenile start in 1779 called 'A Journal by Me, J Q A, Vol: 1st.' It grew, as he entered adulthood, into an almost daily record. An electronic facsimile of this running autobiography, comprising 14,000 digitized pages of JQA's original handwriting, can be found at the website of the Massachusetts Historical Society. David Waldstreicher, professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has distilled 1,200 pages of it, plus chronology and notes, into two volumes in the Library of America's handsome format. It will be the standard reader's edition of this masterpiece, which gives an account of both a fascinating life and a thrilling, disastrous period of American history.