John Adams

Inaugurated on March 4, 1797 as the Second President of the United States under the U.S. Constitution of 1787. Students and Teachers of US History this is a video of Stanley and Christopher Klos presenting America's Four United Republics Curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. The December 2015 video was an impromptu capture... by a member of the audience of Penn students, professors and guests that numbered about 200. ADAMS, John, second president of the United States, born in that part of the town of Braintree, Massachusetts, which has since been set off as the town of Quincy, 31 October 1735; died there, 4 July 1826. His great-grandfather, Henry Adams, received a grant of about 40 Acres of land in Braintree in 1636, and soon afterward immigrated from Devon shire, England, with his eight sons. John Adams, the subject of this sketch, was the eldest son of John Adams and Susanna Boylston, daughter of Peter Boylston, of Brookline. His father, one of the selectmen of Braintree and a deacon of the Church, was a thrifty farmer, and at his death in 1760 his estate was appraised at £1,330 9s. 6d., which in those days might have been regarded as a moderate competence. It was the custom of the family to send the eldest son to College, and accordingly John was graduated at Harvard in 1755. Previous to 1773 the graduates of Harvard were arranged in lists, not alphabetically or in order of merit, but according to the social standing of their parents. In a class of twenty-four members John thus stood fourteenth. One of his classmates was John Wentworth, afterward royal governor of New Hampshire, and then of Nova Scotia. After taking his degree and while waiting to make his choice of a profession, Adams took charge of the grammar school at Worcester. It was the year of Braddock's defeat, when the smoldering fires of a century of rivalry between France and England broke out in a blaze of war, which was forever to settle the question of the primacy of the English race in the modern world. Adams took an ...Read More