Life in Bailyn's early colonial era was 'nasty, brutish, and short.' Terroristic violence between and among Europeans and Indians was endemic.īailyn highlights tales of the obscure, the utopian, and the bizarre. The Barbarous Years is not ground-breaking like his Pulitzer-winning books, but it is more comprehensive, ranging across the raw edge of European settlement on the North American mainland. Bailyn has since focused on the colonists' broader Atlantic context, and The Barbarous Years is a fulfillment of that project.

In the 1980s, Bailyn turned to social and demographic history, with The Peopling of British North America (1986) and Voyagers to the West (1986), which also won the Pulitzer Prize. One is the intellectual history of the American Revolution, which he and his former student Gordon Wood reshaped with their 'republican' thesis of the 1960s, led by Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize-winning Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). Who needs retirement?įew professors can claim to have changed the study of any field. His latest book, The Barbarous Years, appeared as he turned ninety. Bailyn, like Morgan, has been blessed with an extraordinary long life and career. Both studied under Harvard's legendary Perry Miller, the greatest historian of the American Puritans. Edmund Morgan of Yale, who recently passed away at 97, is the other contender. Harvard's Bernard Bailyn is arguably our most influential historian of colonial and Revolutionary America.

The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn