---
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title: "Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades"
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# Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

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## Description

The brilliance of a master historian shines through this personal account of a lifetime’s work. 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. 40 illustrations

Review: How great history is written - I think several primary contributions of this volume stood out to me. First it has some interesting background material on writing history in an introductory chapter. Next, there are five studies at the core of the book, all illuminating the writing of history. And finally there are biographical studies of two of the author's former colleagues in the Harvard history department, both giants in the field, Samuel Eliot Morison and Oscar Handlin. The writing of history has long been a primary interest of the author; he is highly effective at teaching and demonstrating the writing of great history. At age 97, it is especially fitting to watch him do what he does best--write outstanding history while he demonstrates some of his techniques. One of the major foci of the book is how the author comes to a topic, how he researches it, and then puts it all together in the finished piece. All five studies well demonstrate all these facets. The first shows how a surprise discovery of a document can suggest a topic. It deals with the 1653 will of a Puritan merchant that the author comes across in his research. This quite extensive document records much about the friction and problems the decedent had encountered during his life, and the will is sort of a payback to those who created problems for him. It tells us a great deal about the early American Puritans, and how they lived in colonial Massachusetts, as the decedent grapples with how one gains entry into heaven--by predestination or good works. The second essay shows how the author set about evaluating some theories offered by other historians about family life at the beginning of British settlements in America. What is particularly interesting is how the author must react to a continuing stream of such studies, adjusting his analysis to take them into consideration. History is not written in isolation; there are others also at work in the same field and their work can really impact one's own emerging conclusions. Next, how does a historian determine the actual beliefs of colonial actors. In the fourth study, the author discovers an expansive collection of newspapers, extensively annotated by a colonial resident. It runs 3,280 pages and is filled with candid comments and reactions to the news of the day. Also further insights into how people actually thought about things emerge from a 1777 Massachusetts poll of towns as various proposals are put forward to draft a constitution. Each town casts votes in a written form with some prickly asnd illuminating reactions included. I failed to find the fourth essay on the Pietist German settlement in pre-revolutionary Pennsylvania particularly interesting. The author has written extensively on immigration, so he wanted to study one of the groups who migrated to America. But what is interesting is how he went about studying the village where these folks lived. He learned about their music, choir techniques, their mystical language and symbolism, singing styles, hymns and architecture. To write good history you sometimes have to engage in time-consuming digging of sources. The final essay I enjoyed the most. It traces how the author became interested in and a major contributor to the Atlantic History movement. This approach brings together elements of early European, African and American history and studies their interactions for 300 years up to 1850. All other influences are ignored. Scholars from a variety of countries write from their individual perspectives. Some of AH work is fascinating to read, and the author has been a major influence from his perch at Harvard. In an Epilogue, The Elusive Past, Bailyn attacks a major issue in historical circles, can historians ever be truly objective? A book well worth reading by anyone interested in writing history or just reading it. Bailyn is among the best historians we have had and his views are not only instructive but also interesting to read. A worthy volume indeed.
Review: very satisfied - as expected, very satisfied

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #2,610,176 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #850 in Historiography (Books) #35,995 in World History (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 42 Reviews |

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ How great history is written
*by R***K on June 16, 2020*

I think several primary contributions of this volume stood out to me. First it has some interesting background material on writing history in an introductory chapter. Next, there are five studies at the core of the book, all illuminating the writing of history. And finally there are biographical studies of two of the author's former colleagues in the Harvard history department, both giants in the field, Samuel Eliot Morison and Oscar Handlin. The writing of history has long been a primary interest of the author; he is highly effective at teaching and demonstrating the writing of great history. At age 97, it is especially fitting to watch him do what he does best--write outstanding history while he demonstrates some of his techniques. One of the major foci of the book is how the author comes to a topic, how he researches it, and then puts it all together in the finished piece. All five studies well demonstrate all these facets. The first shows how a surprise discovery of a document can suggest a topic. It deals with the 1653 will of a Puritan merchant that the author comes across in his research. This quite extensive document records much about the friction and problems the decedent had encountered during his life, and the will is sort of a payback to those who created problems for him. It tells us a great deal about the early American Puritans, and how they lived in colonial Massachusetts, as the decedent grapples with how one gains entry into heaven--by predestination or good works. The second essay shows how the author set about evaluating some theories offered by other historians about family life at the beginning of British settlements in America. What is particularly interesting is how the author must react to a continuing stream of such studies, adjusting his analysis to take them into consideration. History is not written in isolation; there are others also at work in the same field and their work can really impact one's own emerging conclusions. Next, how does a historian determine the actual beliefs of colonial actors. In the fourth study, the author discovers an expansive collection of newspapers, extensively annotated by a colonial resident. It runs 3,280 pages and is filled with candid comments and reactions to the news of the day. Also further insights into how people actually thought about things emerge from a 1777 Massachusetts poll of towns as various proposals are put forward to draft a constitution. Each town casts votes in a written form with some prickly asnd illuminating reactions included. I failed to find the fourth essay on the Pietist German settlement in pre-revolutionary Pennsylvania particularly interesting. The author has written extensively on immigration, so he wanted to study one of the groups who migrated to America. But what is interesting is how he went about studying the village where these folks lived. He learned about their music, choir techniques, their mystical language and symbolism, singing styles, hymns and architecture. To write good history you sometimes have to engage in time-consuming digging of sources. The final essay I enjoyed the most. It traces how the author became interested in and a major contributor to the Atlantic History movement. This approach brings together elements of early European, African and American history and studies their interactions for 300 years up to 1850. All other influences are ignored. Scholars from a variety of countries write from their individual perspectives. Some of AH work is fascinating to read, and the author has been a major influence from his perch at Harvard. In an Epilogue, The Elusive Past, Bailyn attacks a major issue in historical circles, can historians ever be truly objective? A book well worth reading by anyone interested in writing history or just reading it. Bailyn is among the best historians we have had and his views are not only instructive but also interesting to read. A worthy volume indeed.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ very satisfied
*by E***E on July 18, 2020*

as expected, very satisfied

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Bailyn shines a light on early American history and his devotion to its study.
*by S***S on May 30, 2020*

Sydney M. Williams “Illuminating History,” by Bernard Bailyn May 30, 2020 “History in the richest sense must be, I believe, both a study and a story – that is structural studies woven into narratives that explain the long term process of change and short-term accidents, decisions and encounters which together changed the world from what it had been.” Bernard Bailyn (1922-) Illuminating History, 2020 Did you ever read a book and say, I wish I had had the author as a teacher? At age 97, Bernard Bailyn, Professor Emeritus of Early American History at Harvard, has authored his latest of over thirty books. Two earlier ones, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution, won Pulitzer Prizes. This short book (246 pages), includes a seventeen-page introduction, forty-one-page epilogue and appendix, and five chapters. It is a chronology of Professor Bailyn’s academic life, from his thesis on Tristram Shandy at Williams College in 1943 to a seminar at Harvard, “Justice: Europe in America, 1500-1830,” in 2010. History interested him, he tells us, as he wanted to explore the “connections between a distant past and an emerging modernity.” “I discovered…within the plentiful data, [that] one or more obscure documents or individuals…illuminated the greater picture.” Bailyn’s specialty is the American Revolution and events leading to it: “the pivot on which the whole of American history and much of Western civilization turned.” In the first chapter, “Keayne’s Will,” he explores colonial Boston. He takes the reader through the Will of Robert Keayne (1595-1656), in which Keayne reconciles his success as a Boston immigrant merchant with his belief in a harsh Puritan God. The Will was written over several years and provides clues to the man and the time. As Bailyn writes, “…he made clear the high tension that had always existed between his success in his ‘calling’ and the constraints on the spirit that had inspired it.” In Chapter two, using census data, Bailyn explores family and home life in England and in British North America. “In that era a transformation had taken place in the form of education, the key to which lay not in formal schooling but in the history of family life, the primal core of education, and also the community and the church.” We travel to the English village of Nottinghamshire to look at families, their size and mobility. He deduces that the impact of the Industrial Revolution had not been “as radical as had been presumed.” We return to Massachusetts and the towns of Plymouth, Dedham and Andover. Among discoveries was that the average age at death for the twenty-nine male founders of Andover was 71.8. For the women, it was 70.8. “Harbottle’s Index” heads the third chapter. Harbottle Dorr was a Boston shopkeeper who collected and indexed newspapers in the decade before the Revolutionary War, providing researchers an invaluable source. As well, Bailyn quotes from half a dozen news articles written before the Revolution by a preacher from Lyme (now Old Lyme), Connecticut, Stephen Johnson, who stressed that the gripe with England was not with the King, “but [with] Parliament and the late British ministry and their tools and hangers-on in England and America,” those whom today would be called bureaucrats. Using town records regarding acceptance of the Massachusetts State Constitution, especially those from Petersham, Bailyn gains a sense of people’s feeling toward self-government. As for the people of Petersham, their “commentary was unique in the breadth of its coverage, in its analytical acuity and in its extraordinary devotion to protecting every shred of the individual’s freedom against the powers of constituted authority.” The fourth chapter is about “the charismatic, God-possessed Johann Conrad Beissel” Beissel was born in south western Germany in 1691 and emigrated to America around 1730. Two years later he created the Ephrata cloister, dedicated to celibacy, religion and music. It was located in what is now the borough of Ephrata, fifty-seven miles north west of Philadelphia. It was in music that the untrained Beissel “found his greatest spiritual satisfaction.” His mentee (and later friend of Benjamin Franklin), Peter Miller wrote of Beissel’s adopted Country, which had granted him liberty of conscience, after he had been driven out of his fatherland: it will “always be blessed and be a nursery of God…” In the final chapter, Professor Bailyn uses the family of Thomas Hutchinson, the last royal governor of Massachusetts, to shed light on the networks created by transatlantic trade. He writes of how they became a model of what “…would become, a century later, the vast latticework of economic, political, and cultural entanglements that spanned the four continents of the Atlantic world.” Between 1996 and 2010, Bailyn created a series of annual seminars to address connections between the four continents facing the Atlantic: “It was a world in motion, its populations shifting, large groups reorganizing their communal life in new and strange circumstances.” In the epilogue, Bailyn writes of philosophical difficulties facing historians: “The past is a different world, and we seek to understand it as it was.” But, “we cannot divest ourselves of our own assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and experiences – strip away everything that intervened between now and then…” He suggests that historic fiction, when well done, can provide a reliable historical framework. Tributes to his two PhD advisors, Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) and Oscar Handlin (1915-2011), comprise the appendix. While both shared a passion for history, they differed in backgrounds and approach to its study. The word “Illuminating” in the title is fitting, for the story he tells sheds light, not only on the scholarship that interests him, but also on his seven decades of academic life. It is a fascinating read.

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