Voyagers to the West

About Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn did his undergraduate work at Williams College and his graduate work at Harvard, where he is currently Adams University Professor Emeritus and director of the International Seminar on the Atlantic World. His previous books include The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century; Education in the Forming of American Society; Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776; The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which received the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes in 1968; The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, which won the 1975 National Book Award for History; Voyagers to the West, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987; and Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence.

Praise

"These two volumes [The Peopling Of British North America: An Introduction And Voyagers To The West] bring to a triumphant culmination not only a distinguished career but some of the best work of an entire generation of American historians .... He wants to come closer than any predecessor to a comprehensive account of immigration to British North America -- the origins, the motives, the experience -- and these volumes persuade me that he has succeeded....Bailyn has inaugurated one of the most important historical works of the last thirty years."

-- David Levin, The Nation

"A grandly conceived attempt to employ the newest techniques of historical research (notably computerized demographic analysis) to achieve an old purpose: the recovery of a people's mentality from beneath the layers of myth and received opinion that have obscured it....[Votagers To The West] is conceived on an epic scale and executed with heroic determination."

-- Andrew Delbanco, New Republic

"Voyagers To The West is a superb book.... Bailyn joins the imagination and organizing skills of a master scholar to powerful stylistic gifts....It should be equally admired by and equally as attractive to the general reader as to the professional historian."

-- R. C. Simmons, Journal of American Studies

"[Bailyn's] concern -- his passion -- is to make the emigrants and their experiences live once more.... His fusions -- of the general and the particular, of the abstract and the concrete, of thought and feeling -- are the ideal of modern historical writing."

Awards

WINNER 1987 Pulitzer Prize