The Barbarous Years, Bernard Bailyn
The Barbarous Years, Bernard Bailyn
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The Barbarous Years
The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

Author: Bernard Bailyn

Narrator: Henry Strozier

Unabridged: 26 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 05/10/2013


Synopsis

They were a mixed multitude-- from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland. They moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures, and under different auspices and circumstances. Even the majority that came from England fit no distinct socioeconomic or cultural pattern. They came from all over the realm, from commercialized London and the southeast; from isolated farmlands in the north still close to their medieval origins; from towns in the Midlands, the south, and the west; from dales, fens, grasslands, and wolds. They represented the entire spectrum of religious communions from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Puritan Calvinism and Quakerism. They came hoping to re-create if not to improve these diverse lifeways in a remote and, to them, barbarous environment. But their stories are mostly of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and recapture lost worlds. And in the process they tore apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded. Later generations, reading back into the past the outcomes they knew, often gentrified this passage in the peopling of British North America, but there was nothing genteel about it. Bailyn shows that it was a brutal encounter-- brutal not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves. All, in their various ways, struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured people, and felt themselves threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. In these vivid stories of individual lives-- some new, some familiar but rewritten with new details and contexts-- Bailyn gives a fresh account of the history of the British North American population in its earliest, bitterly contested years.

About Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn is Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, emeritus, at Harvard University, where he received a PhD in 1953 and then taught for more than fifty years. His many distinguished works have been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Humanities Medal. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he received an AB from Williams College in 1945 after serving in the Army Signal Corps and the Army Security Agency during World War II. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Diana on December 04, 2013

This book was impressive and eye-opening. Certainly much different from the whitewashed history of American colonization I read. Of course you get the general idea that the Native Americans got the short end of the stick etc. -- but this book is horrifyingly descriptive in what specific populations......more

Goodreads review by George on June 09, 2013

I was primarily interested in reading this book as further background for my part-time job as an historical interpreter at Pioneer Village in Salem, MA. This is a great curative for books that make our history sound like one long, glorious march of progress. This is a scrupulously-researched, very de......more

Goodreads review by Kristi on February 24, 2013

Very scholarly but engrossing work about those colonists you read about in the first chapter of your middle school history textbook . . . and why the one-dimensional images you were given are almost entirely wrong. Hostility to native peoples was rampant, yes; but colonists were also hostile to any i......more

Goodreads review by Peter on September 15, 2013

I know it was bit of a slog, and took months to finish, but don't judge a book by how long it takes one to read it. This is a masterpiece of historical writing. If you want to know how it felt to be a part of the European settlement of the New World, you can trust Dr. Bailyn to be the one to give an......more

Goodreads review by Nathan on May 06, 2017

This is not a book to be devoured in my usual fashion. It is a book that requires a fair bit of time to read, with over 500 pages of material, and also requires at least a little bit of reflection to digest it. Being fond of reading material about the colonial period of my country as well as materia......more