Over a remarkable career Bernard Bailyn has reshaped our understanding
of the early American past. Inscribing his superb scholarship with
passion and imagination honed by a commitment to rigor, Bailyn captures
the particularity of the past and its broad significance in precise,
elegant prose. His transformative work has ranged from a new reckoning
with the ideology that powered the opposition to British authority in
the American Revolution, to a sweeping account of the peopling of
America, and the critical nurturing of a new field, the history of the
Atlantic world.
Illuminating History is the most personal of Bailyn's works. It is in
part an intellectual memoir of the significant turns in an immensely
productive and influential scholarly career. It is also alive with
people whose actions touched the long arc of history. Among the dramatic
human stories that command our attention: a struggling Boston merchant
tormented by the tensions between capitalist avarice and a constrictive
Puritan piety; an ordinary shopkeeper who in a unique way feverishly
condemned British authority as corrupt and unworthy of public
confidence; a charismatic German Pietist who founded a cloister in the
Pennsylvania wilderness famous for its strange theosophy, its spartan
lifestyle, and its rich musical and artistic achievement. And the good
townspeople of Petersham, whose response in 1780 to a draft
Massachusetts constitution speaks directly to us through a moving
insistence on individual freedoms in the face of an imposing central
authority. Here is vivid history and an illuminating self-portrait from
one of the most eminent historians of our time.
