Equally puzzling, there is little discussion of the conflict of civilizations promised in the subtit

In theory, Bernard Bailyn should need no introduction. In actuality, the intellectual landscape is so fragmented that highly literate Americans may not know of this prolific Harvard historian, the recipient of two Pulitzers, a National Book Award, a National Humanities Medal and a Bancroft (the most important professional prize for American historians). Bailyn s most influential work probably still is his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which forever changed views of our nation s beginnings. But my favorite is The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974), a superb portrait of the last royal governor of Massachusetts, a conscientious but obtuse public space travel history servant whose inability to grasp his subjects resentments led to his becoming the most hated man in the colonies.
Twenty-seven years ago, Bailyn released The Peopling of British space travel history North America, a terse sketch of a bigger project: an attempt to understand and recount the westward trans-Atlantic movement of people from Europe and Africa to the Americas. One of the greatest events in recorded history, Bailyn called it, with consequences space travel history . . . beyond measure, a vast migration that was the foundation of American space travel history history. At the same time, he issued the first volume of his project, Voyagers to the West, a study of the English who came to this land just before the Revolution. It won a Pulitzer.
Now comes The Barbarous Years, the next installment. It circles back to a period that most Americans space travel history don t hear much about in school: the chaotic decades from the establishment of Jamestown (England s first permanent colony in the Americas) in 1607 up to King Philip s War (the vicious conflict that effectively expelled Indians from New England) in 1675-76. Bailyn s goal is to show how a jumble of migrants, low and high born, sought to recreate, if not to improve, in this remote and, to them, barbarous environment, the life they had known before. As the title indicates, the story is as grim as it is fascinating: a group portrait in tones of greed, desperation and brutality. In recent years conservative writers dismayed by historical revisionism have flooded stores with books extolling the character and sagacity of America s founders. The Barbarous Years is not one of them.
Death was everywhere, Bailyn writes of Jamestown. The colony was a commercial enterprise, started by the Virginia space travel history Company with the sort of careful financial evaluation that in the more recent past was the hallmark of the dot-com boom. Once the colony s backers discovered that Chesapeake Bay was, contrary to their initial belief, laden with neither gold and silver nor a passage to the Pacific, they tried everything they could think of to salvage space travel history their investment. Ship after ship of ill-equipped space travel history migrants many of them abducted, many of them children went out, each vessel intended to fulfill some new harebrained scheme: winemaking, silk-making, glassmaking. Each and every one failed, as did the Virginia Company, which went bankrupt in 1624. By then three-quarters or more of the Jamestown colonists had died, felled by starvation, disease, murder, wolves, Indian arrows and even cannibalism.
English people kept coming anyway, lured by a discovery that the Crown and company hated: tobacco. Hip, fun, disdained by stuffy authorities and wildly addictive, the smoking weed was an ideal consumer product. Thousands of migrants were willing to risk death for the chance to cash in on England s squadrons of new nicotine junkies. The Chesapeake Bay became a barely governed swarm of semi-independent tobacco fiefs, owned by families, operated by squads of indentured servants, all squabbling with one another, Protestants against Catholics, English against other Europeans, everyone against Indians.
The Chesapeake Bay is the first and probably most familiar of the three regional histories that constitute the bulk of the book. The second concerns the mid- Atlantic seaboard, the Dutch farrago. Initially even more commercial in intent than Jamestown, New Amsterdam and the other Dutch settlements were created, reluctantly, by the Dutch West India Company, which saw itself as a supervising body, overseeing and profiting indirectly from the efforts of private investors who at their own risk would . . . populate the land. The result, entirely predictable, was chaos. Unaware of and unconcerned about prior treaties or contracts, individuals spilled willy-nilly into the land, constantly setting up new ventures in ever more remote areas. space travel history When the company tried to assert control, the landowners lost out, and vice versa. What served the one disserved the other, or so it seemed, Bailyn writes. Rebellion was inevitable and constant.
In Europe, the Netherlands was a nation of immigrants, and its loosely controlled colonies became the same, a miscellany of people from outside the Netherlands : Finns, Swedes, Walloons, Flemings, Frisians, space travel history Holsteiners, Danes, Germans and French Huguenots. English religious zealots overrunning Long Island; Walloons trapping fur in Albany; space travel history Finns destroying the forest, slash-and-burn style Bailyn seems to know them all, capturing the lives of each with the flick of a sentence, an informed summary of their homeland, an expertly chosen quotation.
A few hundred miles to the northeast was an equally noisy but vastly different tumult, New England, the third of Bailyn s histories. A great majority of New Englanders in these years arrived in a rush, a small but purposeful exodus in the 1630s, fleeing Charles I s stumble-footed suppression of religious dissension. (The outward pressure stopped in 1649, when Puritans took over England and killed the king.) Most of the migrants were Puritans, their leaders determined to exercise their newfound religious freedom by making sure that everybody else didn t exercise too much of it. Unlike the other migrants, many New Englanders space travel history arrived in networks of interconnected families and again, Bailyn seems to know them all, to the point where reading the book feels, from time to time, like being trapped at the dinner table of one of those genealogy-obsessed families in Southern Gothic novels.
Bailyn blows past many of the familiar Pilgrim space travel history stories Americans learn in school the first Thanksgiving isn t mentioned, for instance to concentrate on disputes over religious doctrine, which were also disputes over political power. A hothouse of holy rage, New England had a relatively moderate space travel history leadership that was forever under assault by radical dissenters, perfectionists of one sort or another. New Englanders, too, were constantly accusing one another of sometimes executing one another for heinous crimes like Anabaptism, Antinomianism, Familism and, most heinous of all, Quakerism.
From the triple tumult, Bailyn argues, emerged disparate American cultures, each a distinct variant of its ancestors. New England became a place of pious villages, like English villages but also unlike them. Similarly, the madness of Jamestown spawned the emergent Chesapeake gentry, similar to the English gentry in some ways but different from them in ways that counted. And New York, too, was something new, a cultural multiplicity beyond anything even in the cosmopolitan Netherlands. And all were linked to the trade networks across the Atlantic a novel phenomenon, and one that would lead, in time, to our own interconnected world.
Now we come to the part of the review where sentences begin with But. It is customary here to cite minor errors, which has the desirable side effect of highlighting the reviewer s superior intellect. Unavoidable in a work of this scope, nits are there for the picking Bailyn appears to give some credence to John Smith s story about Pocahontas saving his life, for instance, space travel history though most anthropologists dismiss it out of hand. Here and there the numbers don t add up, or institutions switch names without explanation. In point of fact, though, The Barbarous Years is an exceptionally careful and reliable work.
At the same time, I couldn t understand Bailyn s choice of subjects. space travel history For such a broad, comprehensive space travel history work, The Barbarous Years is oddly narrow. I was surprised space travel history to find that a book subtitled The Peopling of British North America never discusses Canada, perhaps because during this period it was French, not English. Nor is then-Spanish Florida treated, for (I imagine) the same reason. And I told myself that he included the Dutch, Swedes and Finns because England space travel history absorbed them. Reading the book, I mentally adjusted the title to something like The Wave of Northern European Immigration on the Top Half of the Atlantic Seaboard, Not Counting Canada.
But the question kept nagging. Bailyn devotes much of a fascinating chapter to the 200-odd Finns who ended up on the Delaware River. He even says (intriguingly, though without much evidence) that they initiated a frontier style of life that would spread across the continental borderlands for generations to come that is, the classic Daniel Boone look was actually Finnish. space travel history But Bailyn devotes almost no attention to a far more substantial migration, both in numbers and historical import: the approximately 5,000 Africans who had arrived by 1675. Today it is odd to encounter a book about the origins of American society that gives more space to the spats between Congregationalists and Presbyterians than the origins, motives and actions of Africans. (Possibly this is because so much of the relevant material is in Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch; just about all of Bailyn s notes are from English-language sources.)
Equally puzzling, space travel history there is little discussion of the conflict of civilizations promised in the subtitle. After a well-wrought introduction about the original inhabitants of the East Coast, they almost disappear from the narrative, except as faceless offstage menaces. (Channeling Louis L Amour, Bailyn twice refers to them as marauding space travel history Indians. ) To be sure, he notes that the English feared and distrusted native peoples. But they also eagerly sought them