Question

Read the excerpt below (from Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams) with accuracy and fluency. Discuss any unfamiliar words from the passage and what strategies you used to understand them.
Until the Great Exposition closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been grasped by the best-informed man in the world. While he was thus meditating chaos, Langley came by, and showed it to him. At Langley's behest, the Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley knew what to study, and why, and how; while Adams might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky Way. Yet Langley said nothing new, and taught nothing that one might not have learned from Lord Bacon, three hundred years before; but though one should have known the "Advancement of Science" as well as one knew the "Comedy of Errors," the literary knowledge counted for nothing until some teacher should show how to apply it.

Answer 1

This is a personal question. I will answer below according to the word that was unfamiliar to me, but feel free to add to the answer in case there were more for you.

Answer and Explanation:

The word that I found unfamiliar and whose meaning I did not know at first was "behest". I had never seen that word before. To understand its meaning, I looked for context clues. The rest of the sentence in which "behest" appears functions as a clue to finding its meaning. It says that, at a person's behest, something happened: "the Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself. . ." As soon as I read this part, it made me think of the word "command." For instance, the sentence "At the general's command, the troops advanced" has a similar connotation to the one with "behest".

To confirm my assumptions, I looked the word up online and found it indeed means "order" or "command".