And a Note of Appreciation
Posted on December 12th, 2012 in Uncategorized | 17 Comments »
Around Thanksgiving I wanted to mention one thing for which I was particularly thankful, but then the time got away from me, so let me do it now.
I often write on this blog about frauds and charlatans and egoists of various types, because there are so many of them and they get away with so much, and because I am cranky that way. (For better or worse, I attribute this to my father, who was impatient with piffle and puffery.)
I also deplore these rogues, charming and not, because they often steal attention away from men and women of great accomplishment who are less good at self-promotion. I like to write about those folks as well. It is my theory that one of the keys to really enjoying life is recognizing the presence of brilliance in your midst, because it is so timeless but also so transient.
On that subject, I was delighted to read a couple of weeks ago that Bernard Bailyn has a new book out, The Barbarous Years—The People of North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675.
Had I stayed in graduate school to write my thesis instead of dropping out to rejoin the world, Bud Bailyn would have been my thesis adviser. He was certainly the most powerful and exciting intellectual presence I encountered at Harvard, and in a strange way, he’s the reason I dropped out: I knew I would never be half the historian that he is, and I didn’t want to study for years and years only to emerge as Salieri. But I never resented Bailyn for that; I admired him for the vast scope of his knowledge and the vigor of his insights. He could be a terrifying teacher—one did not want to walk into Bailyn’s seminar unprepared—but he was a deeply inspiring one.
And here’s another thing I always loved about Bailyn’s work, something that he doesn’t get sufficient credit for: He is an absolutely beautiful writer. One should read his books and essays not just for their intellectual content, but for the grace and clarity of his prose.
My favorite short piece of Bailyn’s is “The Index and Commentaries of Harbottle Dorr,” which is contained in his book Faces of Revolution. (You can start the essay by searching inside the book on Amazon, here.)
It is a gem of an essay about the principles and passions of an ordinary man in the years preceding the American Revolution, and I find it incredibly moving; this is a little embarrassing to admit, but the last sentence of that essay has moved me to tears on more than one occasion. Hundreds of years later, I feel some connection with Harbottle Dorr. Take away the WordPress, and my sputterings and ruminations are not so different from his.
Of course, not everyone will feel such a connection, but…read the first paragraph; it is a perfect paragraph. You simply can not write a better paragraph than that.
And that was another reason why I dropped out of graduate school; because such simple, straightforward, yet compelling writing was so out of academic vogue.
(I remember going to Skip Gates’ job talk in 1990, I think, and quickly dissolving into laughter—quickly muffled laughter—as Gates delivered sentence after sentence so freighted with academic jargon, nobody in the room had the slightest idea what he was talking about…but everyone was pretending to. I got the impression that even Gates didn’t know what he was saying, but was just playing a game of academic Mad Libs—and he was smart enough to know that it didn’t much matter.)
I couldn’t write the stuff that was trendy, had no interest in writing it, and so it seemed that my path to advancement was at least partially blocked.
So: This is a long way of saying what a pleasure it is to see that there is a new book from Bernard Bailyn and how excited I am to read it.
17 Responses
12/12/2023 8:24 pm
And I’m not ashamed to say that this entire post and all the consideration that you brought to it moved me to tears. Thank
you for the share, Richard; sincerity is simply sexy. And I’m going to buy Mr. Bailyn’s book.
12/12/2023 8:24 pm
And I’m not ashamed to say that this entire post and all the consideration that you brought to it moved me to tears. Thank
you for the share, Richard; sincerity is simply sexy. And I’m going to buy Mr. Bailyn’s book.
12/12/2023 9:52 pm
Of all Professor Bailyn’s great books, this is the best.
12/12/2023 10:31 pm
Bud was, by virtue of an accident of his birthday and an arbitrary date written into federal legislation, the last Harvard professor to be forced into retirement on account of age. A good argument against mandatory retirement and a huge loss to the university. Wonderful that he is still publishing.
I have a personal fondness for his essay on university governance, Fixing the Turnips, which he wrote for Harvard Magazine at the time Bok retired (for the first time). It explains why our governing boards are lay people, not academics, and discusses the balance between utility and “learning for its own sake” as the institutional mission. In the days when I made all incoming freshmen read Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” I also made them read this. I wished I could make all the professors read it too.
12/13/2012 12:22 pm
To be so inspired by and get so close to one of your intellectual idols, is enviable and so worthy of this kind of “shout out.” And, I suspect that it is a rare and treasured thing when an historian receives appreciation for his good work that’s so insightful. I hope he has a notion of such.
12/15/2012 10:21 am
A lovely tribute to a great historian.
12/19/2012 11:48 pm
And then we have the Harvard Magazine review of Professor Bailyn’s book. A great historian’s summation of a lifetime of scholarship crassly reviewed in a quasi official Harvard periodical. What was going through (the usually very insightful) John Rosenberg’s mind?
The review starts out just fine. Then, the reviewer moves into his politically correct mode (“Many of the problems involve unfortunate choices of language”; “Yet that chapter phrases things in ways that minimize Indian presence on the land”). Of course he moves into his PC mode… he is writing for a Cambridge publication. Why is it that reviewers feel the need to make political statements; they should just review the book?
http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/brutish-beginnings
12/20/2012 7:01 am
Sam, are editors supposed to rewrite reviews of scholarly books by other scholars?
Daniel K. Richter is Nichols professor of American History and Dunn director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of, among other books, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (2011) and Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (2001, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), both published by Harvard University Press.
12/20/2012 9:00 am
Harry,
Of course editors are not supposed to rewrite reviews, and they should not. However, editors do not have to accept a review that is submitted or one that they have asked for.
In this particular case, John did not have to publish this review. In my mind, common courtesy toward Professor Bailyn would have prevented the review from being published.
This is his summation of an extraordinarily productive and brilliant academic career from a professor who has served Harvard long and well. At age 90, I thought he deserved something better from Harvard Magazine than to have this (oh so politically correct) review published.
12/20/2012 10:17 am
I see — editors should not edit the reviews, just censor them in their entirety if the author might be offended? I really doubt that is the mindset we want from the editor of the alumni magazine (which is editorially independent, and I don’t think the University would regard as “quasi official,” though of course it does have a special relation to the university).
If you think it’s a bad review that should never have been published, I hope you’ll write in and explain why and that the editor publishes your takedown of the reviewer. And I haven’t read the book so your criticisms of the review may be 100% right. But perhaps because I am in the middle of Jill Lepore’s Story of America, I suspect there may be another, more nuanced way of describing the difference in historical perspective between the reviewing and the reviewed historians, other than sounding the “political correctness” alarm.
12/20/2012 10:39 am
Harry,
On December 12th., said I had read the book and it was brilliant, but what the hell do I know.
Reviews are often discarded by editors who decide, for whatever reason, that the reviews submitted are not what they originally wanted. For example, I know for a fact that this has happened in both The American Scholar and the NYT.
Harry, does the University contribute funds for Harvard Magazine? I thought it did, but please correct me if I’m wrong.
I guess we’re on opposite sides of what Professor Richter said. If the phrases he used weren’t politically correct phrases, perhaps I misunderstand the term. Any of my politically correct neighbors here in West Cambridge (that really means almost all of my neighbors), would be applauding Professor Richter in his criticism of Professor Bailyn.
12/20/2012 11:06 am
I think the answer is yes as to the money, whatever that proves. I’ll let it go at that since I haven’t read the book and you have, not that I will be in any better position to judge once I have.
Anyway, the review doesn’t seem that negative to me. If knew that the Magazine was rejecting reviews like that because they were discourteous and not what the editor was looking for, I doubt I would agree to do any more reviews for it. In my review of IB Cohen’s book about Howard Aiken, I suggested that some of the applied science leadership who followed him at Harvard were less than visionary, and that contributed to Stanford’s dominance of CS when Harvard could have seized the future. I might have hurt some feelings around here with that. Perhaps I was too subtle, but I’m glad the editor let it go.
1/6/2024 9:21 pm
Sam,
Is Bud the victim of a second PC review, which another editor allowed to be published, in the NYT this time? After a respectful beginning, the review shifts tone: 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. 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.)
… For decades, historians like Gary B. Nash, Alan Taylor, Daniel K. Richter and Gordon S. Wood have been arguing that, as Taylor wrote this year, colonial America was “an unprecedented mixing of African, European and Indian cultures.” “European and Indian worlds blurred at the edges,” Nash wrote in “Red, White and Black,” his history of early North America. “Africans and Europeans made a new world together.” Not so much, apparently, for Bailyn. It’s too bad. Bailyn’s gifts as a historical portraitist are prodigious. There are many, many pleasures in “The Barbarous Years.” But I wish he had chosen to paint a more complete picture.
I can’t judge any of this, but this review doesn’t sound all that different from the one in HM.
2/21/2013 12:53 am
I’m really impressed with your writing skills as well as with the layout on your weblog. Is this a paid theme or did you modify it yourself? Either way keep up the nice quality writing, it’s rare to see a nice
blog like this one nowadays.
Feel free to surf to my weblog … weebly.com
2/24/2013 1:59 am
What’s Going down i’m new to this, I stumbled upon this I have discovered It positively helpful and it has
aided me out loads. I’m hoping to contribute & assist different customers like its helped me. Great job.
Also visit my web page: fotosbonitas.org
3/12/2023 3:58 pm
Si eres uno entre los innumerables de navegantes que se avergüenzan de admitir que todavía posee una dirección de Hotmail, tu momento ha
llegado. Verdaderamente, puede migrar al impresionante nuevo servicio de correo
electrónico de Microsoft Outlook y empezar a utilizar sus servicios inteligentes para combinar
con tus contactos de Facebook y administrar todo el spam acumulado en los últimos años.
my page: sign in hotmail
10/17/2013 7:24 pm
There are numerous motives why individuals choose this belt.
My web blog … flex Belt Review (myanmarmwea.org)