Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

Over a remarkable seven decades, Bernard Bailyn has consistently advanced our understanding of the early American past. His driving passion, honed by a commitment to rigor and precision, has yielded consistently transformative work, from a new reckoning with the American Revolution to a comprehensive account of the peopling of America and his early, pivotal nurturing of Atlantic-world history.
In Illuminating History, Bailyn conveys the excitement and intellectual challenge of excavating the past from evidence that is often both revealing and elusive. Joining personal reflection to historical analysis, he immerses us in the worlds of conflicted Puritan merchants; fierce, almost obsessive opponents of British dominance; German mystics and their achievements in art and music; and traders of people and goods in a developing transatlantic network. His retrospective of many years gives us both vivid history and an illuminating self-portrait.