Overview

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; and a charismatic German Pietist who founded a cloister in the Pennsylvania wilderness. Here is vivid history and an illuminating self-portrait from one of the most eminent historians of our time.

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9781665117609

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Since recording his first book for the Kansas Audio Reader Network in 1985, Tom Parks has enjoyed giving voice to stories. He has been nominated for Audie Awards and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards, and reviewers have described his performances as conversational, energetic, earnest, sincere, and as having a certain gravity. Tom is also an active workshop leader and in-demand speaker for corporations and is a featured lecturer for Carnival Cruise Lines. On the side, Tom gigs as a drummer who performs regularly on the Midwest musical theater circuit. Bernard Bailyn is Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, emeritus, at Harvard University, where he received a PhD in 1953 and then taught for more than fifty years. His many distinguished works have been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Humanities Medal. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he received an AB from Williams College in 1945 after serving in the Army Signal Corps and the Army Security Agency during World War II. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

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