Sometimes an Art

November 3, 2014
Bailyn (The Barbarous Years), a Pulitzer Prize winner and emeritus Harvard historian, has long pursued the history of the era of the American Revolution, of the ideas that animate humans, and, in his latest works, of the peopling of the Western Hemisphere. Here, his muscular style undiminished, Bailyn reflects on all three subjects, plus the challenges of thinking historically. The nine essays in this volume, three of them previously unpublished, go back as far as 1954, the latest being from 2007. Nonspecialists shouldn’t be daunted by the subjects of the essays—current trends (not so current now) in historical scholarship, why history’s losers must be made part of the story of the past, the history of Britain’s provinces, and comparisons between the settling of North America and Australia. Though these essays have no argumentative thread, no single shared link, everything Bailyn tackles is written about authoritatively and winningly. One wishes only that this master historian had rounded out the implication of his book’s title: yes, history is sometimes an art, but what of the times when it isn’t? Otherwise, it’s an omnium-gatherum of this master historian’s scholarship over six decades.

November 1, 2014
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."

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December 15, 2014
Perhaps best known for his seminal 1967 work, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Harvard historian Bailyn's professional life has been broadly 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. One key theme is the challenge of context, which is the historian's duty to provide but which also presents methodological and even moral pitfalls. Another theme is the role of creativity in historical inquiry, and in one of this selection's more personal (yet unfailingly scholarly) essays, Bailyn pays tribute to historians whose innovative methods revealed hitherto submerged worlds while also acknowledging the limitations inherent to such disruptions. Essays on Loyalists in the American Revolution and Thomas Hutchinson, the Royalist governor of Massachusetts, circle back to Bailyn's colonial bailiwick. Recommended for anyone considering a scholarly career in history; casual history buffs may also appreciate Bailyn's rigorous and erudite perspective.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)