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Title details for The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn - Available

The Barbarous Years

The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

by Bernard Bailyn
Henry Strozier
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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.

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  • Release date

    May 1, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781470352080
      • File size: 754154 KB
      • Duration: 26:11:09

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Henry Strozier's deep, authoritative voice fits the tone and the density of this serious, detailed (occasionally dry) history of the early settling of British North America. His reading is expressive and well modulated to fit the sense of the text, which is enlivened at times by a wry or sarcastic tone. He even emotes and acts when the material permits. Despite his skill, he can't always hold on to some of Bailyn's long, complex sentences all the way through. At times, a slow pace and long pauses make the text seem more ponderous. Overall, though, this remains a strong, able reading of a predominantly thoughtful and informative text. W.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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