The Barbarous Years

Starred review from September 10, 2012
This weighty book distills a lifetime of learning of one of our most authoritative historians of colonial America. Continuing his exploration of the demographic origins of the colonies (begun in The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction), Harvard professor emeritus Bailyn offers a history of the colonies built up of brilliant portraits of the people who interacted in these strange and fearsome lands. Much of it is the story of the costs, savagery, terrors, and conflicts that attended the establishment of European outposts in what became the U.S. This is not your school-book colonial history; there’s no Anglo-American triumphalism in its pages. Rather, Bailyn describes “confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility” and the extraordinary heterogeneity of the white and Indian populations. Only a historian as penetrating and stylish of pen as Bailyn could convince you that there was something important to say about the few Finns settling in the colonies. And the squeamish should be forewarned: the true barbarousness of people, European as well as Indian, and white against white, is appalling and shows how thin the veneer of civilization often is and was in the colonies’ early decades. An extraordinary work of profound seriousness, characteristic of its author. 25 illus., 12 maps.

September 15, 2012
Continuing his magisterial, multivolume history of North American colonization, two-time Pulitzer winner Bailyn (To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders, 2003, etc.) recounts the surprisingly brutal early steps. Nowadays, we divide the parties into whites and nonwhites, but no Native American saw it that way. They considered whites subhuman but no less subhuman than members of other tribes with which they fought constantly. Bailyn reminds readers that America's earliest settlers in 1607 Jamestown were not seeking land or liberty but the bonanza of riches the Spanish had discovered further south. For years, arrivals were dominated by upper-class adventurers who shunned manual labor, dying en masse of starvation, disease and Indian attack. As late as 1610, the first ship to arrive after winter greeted 60 skeletal survivors begging for food. After 1614, tobacco farming ensured the colony's survival and the Indians' doom. Schoolchildren learn about Lord Baltimore's effort to provide a tolerant Catholic haven in Maryland but not about the fierce hatred this provoked from Protestants (always a majority even in Maryland) that produced a bloody quasi-civil war. New Holland remained underpopulated because the prosperous Dutch eschewed immigration; disputes and smuggling drained the ruling trading company's profits. Its governor provoked local tribes who annihilated distant settlements and threatened Manhattan, whose quarrelsome citizens refused to resist when English forces arrived in 1664. Religious freedom brought the first settlers to Massachusetts where they established a positively Orwellian theocracy, treating nonconformists with marginally less brutality than the Indians. Popular histories often gentrify these early events, but Bailyn's gripping, detailed, often squirm-inducing account makes it abundantly clear how ungenteel they actually were.

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June 1, 2012

Multi-award-winning historian Bailyn shows that the settlement of British North America was not one of humanity's more glorious moments. As folks poured in from Britain, the Continent, and Africa, bringing with them the culture and class structure of their particular regions, violence often resulted--not simply between indigenous peoples and settlers or settlers and those they enslaved but among various groups of settlers themselves. An eye-opener.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2012
Surveying the founding British settlements of eastern North America, Bailyn, whose laurels include the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes, embeds the stories of Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts in details of the transatlantic demographic movements in play. Uprooting oneself required powerful motivations that Bailyn extracts from the emigrants' social origins in their home countries of England, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Bailyn shows news of the vanguards' fortunes being sent back to Europe to their sponsors, whose particular responses of raising funds, recruiting reinforcements, and propagating the attractions of America as commercial opportunity, escape from social stratification, or religious refuge generate Bailyn's narrative momentum through the first several generations of colonization. With such conceptual themes presiding over his presentation, Bailyn graphically emphasizes the settlement process as one of savage brutality, featuring common contempt for human life aggravated, to be sure, by primitive conditions and appalling death rates but epitomized in continual warfare with Indians, remorselessly tending toward their elimination. In Bailyn's perceptive and erudite hands, the original British, Dutch, and Swedish ventures assume as wild and variegated guises as did the forceful individuals who embarked on them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 1, 2013
Usually the story of early American history is told in tidy vignettes of homogenous settlers, escaping the bonds of an old world's stifling intolerance and blazing a linear course toward freedom. Here Bailyn (history, emeritus, Harvard; "To Begin the World Anew") rips away the facade and in the process reveals a world in which the fragility of life and financial devastation were an ever-present reality. Moving geographically from Virginia northward and broken into concise snapshots, the story of people from around Europe and Africa and their encounters with one another and with indigenous peoples is all-encompassing and told with a flair that only a master storyteller such as Bailyn can accomplish. The book lends itself well to the audio format in spite of its more than 26-hour span. Henry Strozier's reading is solid and never gets in the way of Bailyn's remarkable work of historical achievement. VERDICT Highly recommended to listeners of early American history.--Brian Odom, Birmingham, AL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2012

Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bailyn (Adams University Professor Emeritus, Harvard; To Begin the World Anew) returns to the familiar territory of Colonial Atlantic history in an effort to transform a historiography that has promoted established folkways and orthodox regional identities (as seen, e.g., in David Hacket Fischer's studies). Beginning with the "spiritual, hyperactive, and crowded" world of Native Americans before contact with the English, Bailyn's regional narratives move into a demographic study of the struggle for survival in the Chesapeake; the tumultuous, multicultural environs of Dutch New Amsterdam; and finally to the closed, utopian communities of New England in search of religious perfectionism. Bailyn's colonists are no genteel aristocrats forging distinctive identities but a heterogeneous demographic mix, inhabiting a "barbarous" world in flux and faced with a future filled with contingency. While some of Bailyn's superbly told tales, such as the founding of Jamestown and the struggle for religious orthodoxy in Massachusetts, are fairly well known, a multitude of other parts of his narrative will come as a shock to many readers. VERDICT Drawing on decades of sound, dynamic research, the author has provided scholars and general readers alike with an insightful and engaging account of Colonial America that signals a reset on Colonial studies, the culmination of his work. An important book.--Brian Odom, Pelham P.L., AL

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.