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Adams, Herbert Baxter (b. April 16, 1850, Shutesbury, Mass.—d. July 30, 1901, Amherst), historian and educator, one of the first to use the seminar method in U.S. higher education and one of the founders of the American Historical Association.
The son of a successful merchant and manufacturer, Adams was sent to Phillips Academy, from which he graduated with honours in 1868. After graduation from Amherst College in 1872, he attended lectures in Germany between 1874 and 1876 at Gdttingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, receiving his Ph.D. from the latter in July 1876. His stay in Germany had two results. It started him on the road, in his own historical work, toward a “germ theory of politics,” which traced American political institutions to their supposed origin in early Anglo-Saxon village institutions; and it convinced him of the superior quality of scholarship and instruction possible in the seminar method of teaching.
When Adams returned to Johns Hopkins University in 1876, he was influential in instituting a seminar in history that became an important model for American higher education. In 1882 he became the editor of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science and helped to emphasize the development of political and social institutions in these studies. His own work concentrated to a large extent on the hypothesized Germanic origins of New England towns. Named secretary of the newly formed American Historical Association in 1884, Adams extended his activities to the editing of publications by the U.S. Bureau of Education. While Adams’ own scholarship and criticism were relatively undistinguished, his enthusiasm and interest were highly influential on his students, among them the future U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and the eminent historian Frederick Jackson Turner.
