Bailyn, Wood and American History

Gordon Wood on Bernard Bailyn and William Black on Gordon Wood on Bernard Bailyn (at the Junto)

I was a bit surprised when Wood suggested that historians had not liked the Barbarous Years. I quickly looked at the reviews in AHR and JAH. They weren’t really too negative.    Archer thought that the book was “a marvelous accomplishment and a testament to Bailyn’s standing as one of our finest historians.” Pulsipher declared that it was the “kind of book that the word “magisterial” was made for.”

 

I’m not sure to what extent Bailyn is regarded as an economic historian, but his early work appeared in the Journal of Economic History and Explorations in Entrepreneurial History as well as The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century .

Here is some more recent work on New England merchants and credit by David Flynn and Jeremy Schwartz