Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

Bernard Bailyn

Jul 2020 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Tom Parks

About this audiobook

Over a remarkable career Bernard Bailyn has reshaped our understanding of the early American past. Inscribing his superb scholarship with passion and imagination honed by a commitment to rigor, Bailyn captures the particularity of the past and its broad significance in precise, elegant prose. His transformative work has ranged from a new reckoning with the ideology that powered the opposition to British authority in the American Revolution to a sweeping account of the peopling of America and the critical nurturing of a new field, the history of the Atlantic world.



Illuminating History is the most personal of Bailyn's works. It is in part an intellectual memoir of the significant turns in an immensely productive and influential scholarly career. It is also alive with people whose actions touched the long arc of history. Among the dramatic human stories that command our attention: a struggling Boston merchant tormented by the tensions between capitalist avarice and a constrictive Puritan piety; an ordinary shopkeeper who in a unique way feverishly condemned British authority as corrupt and unworthy of public confidence; and a charismatic German Pietist who founded a cloister in the Pennsylvania wilderness. Here is vivid history and an illuminating self-portrait from one of the most eminent historians of our time.

About the author

Bernard Bailyn is Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, emeritus, at Harvard University. His many distinguished works have been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Humanities Medal. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts. Since recording his first book for the Kansas Audio Reader Network in 1985, Tom Parks has enjoyed giving voice to stories. He has been nominated for Audie Awards and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards, and reviewers have described his performances as "conversational," "energetic," and "sincere."