SOMETIMES AN ART

A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian considers the “unsuspected complexities” of recovering the past.

In this gathering of nine essays, published from 1954 to 2007, Bailyn (Emeritus, History/Harvard Univ.; The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, 2012, etc.) illuminates the historian’s craft. In five pieces on historiography, he considers the distinction between history and collective memory and historians’ struggle to hone a sharp, clear lens—undistorted by personal “assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences”—through which to investigate the realities of past lives. In several essays on the early British Empire, the focus of much of the author’s scholarship, he examines Britain’s relationship with Scotland, the North American colonies and Australia; and the mysteriously vilified Thomas Hutchinson, about whom Bailyn wrote a biography. A tribute to historian Isaiah Berlin gives Bailyn an occasion to reflect on the political and cultural impact of perfectionist movements. The historian’s greatest problem, writes the author, lies in “recovering the contexts in which events take place.” He distinguishes between “manifest history,” “the story of events that contemporaries were clearly aware of, that were…so to speak headline events in their own time,” and history that discovers elusive “latent events,” unrecorded by contemporaries, that “form a new landscape, like that of the ocean floor…never seen before as actual rocks, ravines, and cliffs” but that inexorably shape “the surface world.” Such events include commonplace experiences: the discomfort, for example, “of clothing that itched, of shoes that tore the feet, of lice, fleas, and vermin.” Historians that Bailyn most admires—Perry Miller, Charles McLean Andrews, Lewis Namier and Ronald Syme—were exemplars of contextualization and, therefore, “redirectors of inquiry.”

Informing all of these graceful, authoritative essays is the mind of a humanist whose project is to reanimate “a hitherto unglimpsed world.”