Volume 34, Number 1 · January 29, 1987
New World Symphony
By T.H. Breen
The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction
by Bernard Bailyn
Knopf, 177 pp., $16.95
Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
by Bernard Bailyn, with the assistance of Barbara DeWolfe
Knopf, 668 pp., $30.00
By the middle of the eighteenth century the British appeared to be losing control of the American colonies. Too many people were multiplying too rapidly; they were dispersed over territory too vast for its British administrators to comprehend. During the years before independence the men who ran the empire tried desperately to make sense out of this explosive growth. Bernard Bailyn believes that historians of early America face a similar challenge. Their subject, once so clearly defined, has in recent years lost intellectual coherence. A flood of specialized new knowledge has called into question the organizing principles that once served colonial historians—the rise of American democracy or the celebration of material progress, for example—and, as Bailyn reminds us, history without a unifying structure is unintelligible.
Review, 4089 words
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