In 1765, in the early stages of an imperial crisis and of his career as a lawyer, John Adams wrote a brief retrospect of the political and legal history of the West. Appearing unsigned and untitled in four installments of the Boston Gazette, the essay depicts the history of power as a history of knowledge. It tells modern history as a story of human self-determination rising through reflection. Much of the power of such a narrative for Adams, as later for D'Alembert and other Enlightenment intellectuals, was that it offered him a political self-understanding. But Adams's history offers a more particular self-understanding in two main respects: its history of self-determination yields a protonationalist consciousness of America, while its history of reflection takes the form of a history of letters. Writing at the very moment when America was emerging as a symbolic entity, Adams perfects a story of America's history. It is a history of literature, and its telos is emancipation.

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