Praise for Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History:
“Engaging . . . Mr. Bailyn’s scholarship reveals a colonial world that is hard to see in buildings and other physical artifacts. Among much else, he captures the early fragility of the British Atlantic along with its emerging identities. Bringing such a world into focus on its own terms—and presenting it in a compelling narrative—puts the craft of history on display and illuminates precisely the ‘art’ of history that Mr. Bailyn champions so eloquently.” —William Anthony Hay, The Wall Street Journal
“The persona that presides in these nine extraordinary essays is one of humility at the daunting limitations of seeking to re-create the past . . . One of the delights of this book is that it gathers discordant threads and historical oddments that Bailyn strews throughout his narrative, in a light display of erudition . . . If there is a remonstrance with this collection, it is a complaint that any single one of its nine essays is worth a review in itself. This book would serve as a fitting valedictory for the author’s career and is required reading for anyone interested in the historian’s calling. If history is “sometimes an art,” Bernard Bailyn is surely an artist in its service.” —Jack Schwartz, The Daily Beast
“Dedicated to understanding the English-speaking world in the colonial era . . . The nine essays in this volume, written at various moments in Bailyn’s career, show the author at the top of his game, deeply immersed in his specific area of inquiry but also contemplating broader questions about historiography and the goals of historical inquiry.” —Brendan Driscoll, Booklist
“Bernard Bailyn is one of the most distinguished historians in the Western world . . . He has brought his own creative and imaginative powers to bear on the his field of early American history . . . This collection gives a sampling of his skills and his historical imagination.” —Gordon S. Wood, The Weekly Standard
Further critical acclaim for Bernard Bailyn and his work:
“For approximately half a century, Bailyn has been the country’s most distinguished and influential scholar of the Revolution . . . It is no exaggeration to say that his influence on what the nation knows about its beginnings is immense, if incalculable.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
“One of America’s most discerning historians. His thinking is subtle. His style is forceful . . . Throughout [To Begin the World Anew] he retains a sense of wonder that those men in a clump of distant British provinces could have wrought a political system, a view of the world, that is so imaginative and enduring.” —Anthony Day, Los Angeles Times
“[Bailyn’s] fusions—of the general and the particular, of the abstract and the concrete, of thought and feeling— are the ideal of modern historical writing.” —Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker (on Voyagers to the West)
“If we are lucky, we will have our times analyzed by a historian with the intellectual and literary skills of Bernard Bailyn, who in The Barbarous Years provides a highly detailed and meticulously researched account of the first great stage of England’s dominion over North America . . . The Barbarous Years [is] a cornucopia of human folly, mischief and intrigue.” —James A. Percoco, The Washington Independent Review of Books
“[The Barbarous Years is] simply magisterial: sweeping, authoritative, commanding. But it is that and so much more. It has rare scholarly warmth, an understanding of how to be nimble with the material, to be an entertainer as well as a teacher.” —Peter Lewis, The Christian Science Monitor
2014-10-15
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian considers the "unsuspected complexities" of recovering the past.In this gathering of nine essays, published from 1954 to 2007, Bailyn (Emeritus, History/Harvard Univ.; The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, 2012, etc.) illuminates the historian's craft. In five pieces on historiography, he considers the distinction between history and collective memory and historians' struggle to hone a sharp, clear lens—undistorted by personal "assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences"—through which to investigate the realities of past lives. In several essays on the early British Empire, the focus of much of the author's scholarship, he examines Britain's relationship with Scotland, the North American colonies and Australia; and the mysteriously vilified Thomas Hutchinson, about whom Bailyn wrote a biography. A tribute to historian Isaiah Berlin gives Bailyn an occasion to reflect on the political and cultural impact of perfectionist movements. The historian's greatest problem, writes the author, lies in "recovering the contexts in which events take place." He distinguishes between "manifest history," "the story of events that contemporaries were clearly aware of, that were…so to speak headline events in their own time," and history that discovers elusive "latent events," unrecorded by contemporaries, that "form a new landscape, like that of the ocean floor…never seen before as actual rocks, ravines, and cliffs" but that inexorably shape "the surface world." Such events include commonplace experiences: the discomfort, for example, "of clothing that itched, of shoes that tore the feet, of lice, fleas, and vermin." Historians that Bailyn most admires—Perry Miller, Charles McLean Andrews, Lewis Namier and Ronald Syme—were exemplars of contextualization and, therefore, "redirectors of inquiry." Informing all of these graceful, authoritative essays is the mind of a humanist whose project is to reanimate "a hitherto unglimpsed world."
