Pierre-Antoine DeMachy, Une Exécution capitale, place de la Révolution, (Wikimedia Commons)The Paths of the Historian
The recent publication of Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History by Harvard Emeritus Professor Bernard Bailyn provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on Bailyn the historian and his contribution to the understanding of the 17th and 18th centuries. One cannot always trust the blurbs on the back covers of books, but in this case Jonathan Yardley’s judgment is no mere piece of puffery: “For approximately half a century, Bailyn has been the country’s most distinguished and influential scholar of the Revolution.” The one place where Yardley goes wrong is in limiting Bailyn’s portfolio to the American Revolution. It’s true that…
