From Robert Keayne to Angola, Richard, and Grace: Bernard Bailyn and New England's Place in an Atlantic World

Abstract

W Bernard Bailyn entered graduate school in 1946, studies of New England dominated the field of early American history, many of them produced by Harvard-trained scholars. Two of his teachers, Samuel Eliot Morison and Oscar Handlin, wrote their own—albeit very different—dissertations on Boston.1 Harvard students knew there were practical advantages in choosing a New England topic, since they could find abundant manuscript materials in nearby archives and Widener Library contained nearly any published work they might need.2 Thus Bailyn’s decision to focus his own dissertation on New England hardly seems surprising. Yet the long-range consequences of his choice were anything but predictable. Bailyn’s later prize-winning scholarship on the Revolution and immigration has overshadowed The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, the book based on his dissertation.3 This comparative neglect is unfortunate,