Overview

From one of the most respected historians in America, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a new collection of essays that reflects a lifetime of erudition and accomplishments in history. The past has always been elusive: How can we understand people whose worlds were utterly different from our own without imposing our own standards and hindsight? What did things feel like in the moment, when outcomes were uncertain? How can we recover those uncertainties? What kind of imagination goes into the writing of transformative history? Are there latent trends that distinguish the kinds of history we now write? How unique was North America among the far-flung peripheries of the early British empire? As Bernard Bailyn argues in this elegant, deeply informed collection of essays, history always combines approximations based on incomplete data with empathic imagination, interweaving strands of knowledge into a narrative that also explains. This is a stirring and insightful work drawing on the wisdom and perspective of a career spanning more than five decades--a book that will appeal to anyone interested in history. From the Hardcover edition.

Full Product Details

9781322664873

Table of Contents

Reviews

Advance praise for Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History 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 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

Author Information

BERNARD BAILYN is Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Emeritus at Harvard University. He founded, and for many years directed, the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, which helped to reorient the study of the Atlantic region in the early modern era. His previous books include The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which received the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes in 1968; The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, which won the 1975 National Book Award for History; Voyagers to the West, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987; Atlantic History: Concept and Contours; and The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available