James Truslow Adams, a businessman turned scholar, wrote largely interpretative histories notable for their style and scope. His career spanned the world wars, and he produced scores of volumes and articles, most notably the studies he wrote during the 1920s about early New England.

Adams, a Brooklyn-born member of a business-oriented family, endured an unexceptional childhood during which his training and education better suited him to the world of commerce and investments than to scholarship. His mother, Elizabeth Truslow Adams, was an invalid, and his father, William Newton Adams, was a dour man dissatisfied with his lot in life as a moderately successful employee of a Wall Street brokerage firm. A bookish youth, Adams seldom participated in the games, sports, or other endeavors normally associated with American boys. Aside from an addiction to reading and his success in school, little in his educational background suggested that he would...