Bernard Bailyn out with a new book of essays

Bernard Bailyn, professor emeritus of history at Harvard, recipient of the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes, a winner of the National Book Award, the author of seminal works on the cultural and intellectual history of America’s colonial and Revolutionary periods, could certainly not be faulted for taking a victory lap in this collection based on his lectures and writings over more than 60 years. Instead, the persona that presides in these nine extraordinary essays is one of humility at the daunting limitations of seeking to re-create the past, “a different world” whose contours and texture are elusive if not illusory. This volume is a testament to the craft of the historian by someone who has spent a lifetime working at what he acknowledges is “never a science,’’ but can be “sometimes an art,’’ the title, and theme, of this book.

Each one of the essays in Sometimes an Art has been carefully selected to consider a problem confronting the historian in making sense of the past and conveying it to the reader in a cohesive narrative, which itself may alter the messy, inchoate, and confusing reality that forms the raw stuff of history. We read history with the benefit of hindsight, which the participants lacked. Knowing the outcome, Bailyn writes, “we try to describe the path from then to now’’ that appears inevitable to us, but we can never fully recapture the uncertainty of subjects who were not privy to our knowledge.

In a fascinating section on “Context in History,” Bailyn warns against “the optical illusion” that results from studying the past with reference to the present. He introduces us to Herbert Butterfield, a contrarian of the past century—one of a remarkable cast of characters peopling this book—who in his 1931 “Whig Interpretation of History” took to task historians of inevitability who sought “to extract from complex, ambiguous contexts of the past the seeds of future outcomes.” His foils were the 19th Century English Whig historians who saw a chain of progress from antecedents in the Reformation to the pinnacle of 19th Century British liberalism. In this endeavor, they acclaimed Martin Luther as a harbinger of religious toleration. Butterfield pointed out that Luther was no more tolerant than the pope and that toleration arose gradually. It is this gradualism—arduous, precarious, spasmodic—always harkening to the past, that Bailyn evokes. We are told that Copernicus’s celestial theory was only a modification of the Ptolemaic system; that William Harvey, while demonstrating the empirical truths of blood circulation also believed in vital spirits, and that Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy....