THE PEOPLING OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA
An Introduction
Bernard Bailyn
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986
177 pp., $ 16.95
VOYAGERS TO THE WEST
A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
Bernard Bailyn
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986
704 pp., $ 30.00
Bernard Bailyn's new works provide a historical background for the contemporary and at times bitter debate over immigration policy and the status of the English language, including such dire predictions as John Hutchinson's (THE WORLD & I, No.7, p. 628) that the United States faces a potential tide of Hispanic immigration which is "unlikely to be popular or peaceful, or for the better for either the United States or Western civilization, and could be ravaging to both." In the hands of Bailyn, "immigration history" has taken on new meaning and relevance. Having previously won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award for History, he will undoubtedly receive further honors for Voyagers to the West.
Bailyn's concerns is with "the peopling of British North America," the transatlantic transfer of people and culture from Europe to North America, and the factors that pushed emigrants out to Europe and attracted them to America. This "westward transatlantic movement," he writes, "is one of the greatest events in recorded history." It is a grand theme, perhaps the grandest in American history, encompassing both immigration to America and the westward movement of population into the American back country. In reading Bailyn, one is reminded of the opening sentence of Oscar Handlin's Pulitzer Prize winning book The Uprooted. "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history."
The peopling of British North America was an aspect of the dynamic processes modernizing European medieval society as well as part of the greatest population movement in early modern history. It transformed a primitive and exotic outback into an outpost of western civilization. Bailyn views this peopling process in the broadest possible context as an extension of domestic mobility within Great Britain and Germany. "The North American colonies were simply another destination available to people in motion." But migration to the New World created something new.
In America, "borderland violence and bizarre distensions of normal European culture patterns...[became] fused with a growing civility into a distinctive way of life." Sophistication and savagery intermingled in new and unforeseen patterns, while patterns of European culture took on strange shapes in the New World. There was Harvard College, the American Philosophical Society, and Thomas Jefferson, but there was also the Pequot War, Bacon's Rebellion, and Daniel Boone. Life in America was what one would expect of a land on the meeting point of civilization and the wilderness - crude, disordered, and extravagant.
Bailyn's "peopling of North America" encompasses the
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