History in Context

 Gordon S. Wood  | February 23, 2015 12:00 AM

Although Bernard Bailyn is one of the most distinguished historians in the Western world, he is not as well known as he should be. He rarely appears in the popular media, and he has never published a book that has sold millions of copies. But all those who are seriously interested in the history of early America know his work. He has authored a baker’s dozen of major books, edited at least a half-dozen more, and written numerous important articles. His books have won nearly every award the nation offers to historians: two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and a Bancroft Prize. As professor of history at Harvard, he has trained two generations of graduate students, of whom I was one. More recently, he founded, and for many years directed, the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, which helped to shape a new field of history. 

His new book is a collection of nine essays, three of which have never been published before. They deal with two main subjects, he says: “The problems and nature of history as a craft, at times an art, and aspects of the history of the colonial peripheries of the early British empire.” In one of the hitherto-unpublished essays, entitled “History and the Creative Imagination,” Bailyn defines the modern creative historian as someone who has enriched “a whole area of history by redirecting it from established channels into new directions, unexplored directions, so that what was once vague or altogether unperceived is suddenly flooded with light, and the possibilities of a new way of understanding are suddenly revealed.” Although he was describing the contributions of four 20th-century historians whose work he greatly admires—Perry Miller, Charles McLean Andrews, Sir Lewis Namier, and Sir Ronald Syme—he could have been talking about himself.

Over the course of his long career, he has brought his own creative and imaginative powers to bear on his field of early American history. When I went to graduate school, I thought the colonial period was merely a quaint prologue to the main story, essentially a mishmash of myths and folklore about John Smith and Pocahontas, the Pilgrim Fathers and Squanto, that belonged in the storytelling of elementary school, where I had last learned about them. But Bailyn taught me and, over the years, thousands of other students that colonial history was something other than quaint stories, cobbled streets, and milk-paint houses. In his hands, the colonial period suddenly became seriously real—indeed, it became the most important part of American history. Bailyn’s creative imagination opened new channels, redirected others, and flooded the field of early American history with new light and new understanding. 

In his books and articles he has transformed every aspect of the subjects he touched—from the social basis of colonial politics to early American educational history to the origins of the American Revolution to early American immigration. Few, if any, American historians in the modern era of professional history-writing have dominated their particular subject of specialization to the degree that Bernard Bailyn has dominated early American history in the past half-century. 

This collection gives a sampling of his skills and his historical imagination. Besides his essay on the creative imagination of historians, Bailyn has several other pieces on the craft of history-writing: One deals with the distinction between critical history-writing and memory; another with the importance of context in history-writing; and another with the changing interpretations of the loyalists—the losers in the American Revolution. He has also included his 1981 presidential address to the American Historical Association, which analyzes three general trends in contemporary historiography: the distinction between events of which the participants in the past were conscious and the circumstances of which the participants were not fully aware; the sense of large-scale systems of events in the past operating over not just nations but continents and oceans; and the effort by historians to relate the world of interior, subjective experience to the course of external events. 

In all of his essays, Bailyn demonstrates the remarkable range and depth of his scholarship. There does not seem to be a historian, a work of history, or a historiographical development on either side of the Atlantic, or in the Antipodes, that he has not mastered. 

In the second section, dealing with the colonial peripheries of the early British empire, Bailyn offers us several pieces, most of which are drawn from his grand Peopling of British North America project that he launched in the 1980s. Three books of this project have appeared: The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1986); Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986); and, most recently, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (2012).

Although Voyagers to the West was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and The Barbarous Years was a Pulitzer finalist, the academic community has not much liked Bailyn’s Peopling books. Nothing could be more revealing of the changing fashions of academic history-writing than the criticism leveled at them. It’s as if academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should become simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing. 

In one of his essays, Bailyn quotes Isaiah Berlin’s reactions to American universities and American students during his visit to Harvard in the late 1940s. In contrast to Oxbridge, said Berlin, America’s universities and students were “painfully aware of the social and economic miseries of their society.” They found it hard to justify studying, say, the early Greek epic while the poor went hungry and blacks were denied fundamental rights. How, Berlin wondered, could disinterested scholarship, disinterested history-writing, flourish in such morally painful circumstances?

Nearly 70 years later, it has gotten worse. College students and many historians have become obsessed with inequality and white privilege in American society. And this obsession has seriously affected the writing of American history. The inequalities of race and gender now permeate much of academic history-writing, so much so that the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation’s past has had to turn to history books written by nonacademics who have no Ph.D.s and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars. 

With his Peopling of British North America project, Bailyn got off on the wrong foot from the outset. Didn’t he know, his critics carped, that there were people, indigenous people, already here before the English came? His Peopling books, critics say, smack of American exceptionalism, by which they seem to mean that they concentrate on the origins of the United States. It is true that Bailyn is interested in the sources of the nation. At the beginning of his career, in 1956, he explained that the colonial period contains “for Americans the roots of the present” and “provides and has long provided basic points of reference for national self-awareness. And not merely for scholars or devotees of history. At each stage of our history, popular attention has demanded and received some vital understanding, however ill-informed, of colonial origins.”

But a new generation of historians is no longer interested in how the United States came to be. That kind of narrative history of the nation, they say, is not only inherently triumphalist but has a teleological bias built into it. Those who write narrative histories necessarily have to choose and assign significance to events in terms of a known outcome, and that, the moral critics believe, is bound to glorify the nation. So instead of writing full-scale narrative histories, the new generation of historians has devoted itself to isolating and recovering stories of the dispossessed: the women kept in dependence; the American Indians shorn of their lands; the black slaves brought in chains from Africa. Consequently, much of their history is fragmentary and essentially anachronistic—condemning the past for not being more like the present. It has no real interest in the pastness of the past. 

These historians see themselves as moral critics obligated to denounce the values of the past in order to somehow reform our present. They criticize Bailyn’s work for being too exquisitely attuned “to the temper of an earlier time” and, thus, for failing “to address the dilemmas of its own day.” His desire to re-create the “different world” of the past “as it actually was” is said to be “politically charged,” because, mirabile dictu, it “gives priority to the beliefs of historical actors” over our present beliefs, “thus inhibiting a critical dialogue between past and present values.”

These historians need to read and absorb Bailyn’s essay on “Context in History,” published in this collection for the first time. Perhaps then they would be less eager to judge the past by the values of the present and less keen to use history to solve our present problems. In some sense, of course, they are not really interested in the past as the past at all. “Their vision of the past turns them toward the future,” wrote Nietzsche of such activist historians; they “hope that justice will yet come and happiness is behind the mountain they are climbing. . . . They do not know how unhistorical their thought and actions are in spite of all their history.” 

Not only does the history these moral reformers write invert the proportions of what happened in the past, but it is incapable of synthesizing the events of the past. It is inevitably partial, with little or no sense of the whole. If the insensitive treatment of women, American Indians, and African slaves is not made central to the story, then, for them, the story is too celebratory. Since these historians are not really interested in the origins of the nation, they have difficulty writing any coherent national narrative at all, one that would account for how the United States as a whole came into being. 

For many of them, the United States is no longer the focus of interest. Under the influence of the burgeoning subject of Atlantic history, which Bailyn’s International Seminar on the Atlantic World greatly encouraged, the boundaries of the colonial period of America have become mushy and indistinct. The William and Mary Quarterly, the principal journal in early American history, now publishes articles on mestizos in 16th-century colonial Peru, patriarchal rule in post-revolutionary Montreal, the early life of Toussaint Louverture, and slaves in 16th-century Castile. The journal no longer concentrates exclusively on the origins of the United States. Without some kind of historical GPS, it is in danger of losing its way.

Bailyn’s 2012 book The Barbarous Years, which deals with the early-17th-century origins of the English colonies, has been criticized for being too narrow and for not including Canada and Spanish Florida in its narrative. And the Indians, well, no matter how much space Bailyn gives to them, no matter how sensitive his analysis of the native peoples, it would never be enough. To his critics, Bailyn’s Indians remain simply a “faceless offstage menace.” Bailyn’s vivid and detailed descriptions of the brutal and vicious treatment of the Indians by the English have boomeranged on him: His critics now complain that he didn’t fully appreciate the Indians’ contribution to English well-being and the extent to which the native peoples provided the economic glue that tied the separate colonial regions together. In other words, unless the Indians became the main characters in his story, Bailyn couldn’t win. 

No historian, including Bernard Bailyn, denies the importance of the native peoples in shaping colonial America. But it is a question of proportion, of fitting the Indians into a story in which, tragically, they become steadily marginalized and eventually overwhelmed. Nevertheless, for us today, looking back through centuries, the whites’ treatment of the Indians seems totally immoral and inexcusable. Can history ever evade that kind of moral judgment? Can putting the past in context help? Bailyn quotes Herbert Butterfield from his remarkable little book of 1931, The Whig Interpretation of History, to emphasize the importance of context in history. “The dispensing of moral judgments upon people or upon actions in retrospect,” wrote Butterfield, is the “most useless and unproductive of all forms of reflection.” And still it goes on. 

It continues, Bailyn concedes, because “to explain contextually is, implicitly at least, to excuse.” Placing what we today clearly see as the evils of the past in historical context seems to justify them. Historians can explain, contextually, the Founders’ plight in dealing with slavery. Historians can show, says Bailyn, that they “were confronting without precedent or guidance the problem of racial differences in a theoretically egalitarian society, and that they were struggling with the related dilemma of bondage, an immemorial condition, in a free society.” Nonetheless, the Founders are going to be bitterly condemned by our present-day moralists for not eliminating slavery entirely. The problem, Bailyn concludes, is systematic and inherent: “a seemingly inescapable consequence” of a deeply contextual approach to history.

Despite the difficulties of writing narratives involving good contextual history, however, Bailyn believes it can and must be done. Historians, he writes, have an obligation to tell us, “in some sequential—that is to say, narrative—form, what has happened in the past, what the struggles were all about, where we have come from.” In his illustrious career, he has more than fulfilled that obligation. 

Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way university professor and professor of history emeritus at Brown. In honor of the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act, the Library of America will publish his two edited volumes, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, 1764-1776 , in June.