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The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Audiobook
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They were a mixed multitude-- from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland. They moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures, and under different auspices and circumstances. Even the majority that came from England fit no distinct socioeconomic or cultural pattern. They came from all over the realm, from commercialized London and the southeast; from isolated farmlands in the north still close to their medieval origins; from towns in the Midlands, the south, and the west; from dales, fens, grasslands, and wolds. They represented the entire spectrum of religious communions from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Puritan Calvinism and Quakerism. They came hoping to re-create if not to improve these diverse lifeways in a remote and, to them, barbarous environment. But their stories are mostly of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and recapture lost worlds. And in the process they tore apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded. Later generations, reading back into the past the outcomes they knew, often gentrified this passage in the peopling of British North America, but there was nothing genteel about it. Bailyn shows that it was a brutal encounter-- brutal not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves. All, in their various ways, struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured people, and felt themselves threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. In these vivid stories of individual lives-- some new, some familiar but rewritten with new details and contexts-- Bailyn gives a fresh account of the history of the British North American population in its earliest, bitterly contested years.
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“Bailyn’s colonists are no genteel aristocratsforging distinctive identities but a heterogeneous demographic mix, inhabitinga ‘barbarous’ world in flux and faced with a future filled with contingency.While some of Bailyn’s superbly told tales, such as the founding of Jamestownand the struggle for religious orthodoxy in Massachusetts, are fairly wellknown, a multitude of other parts of his narrative will come as a shock to manyreaders. Verdict: Drawing on decades ofsound, dynamic research, the author has provided scholars and general readersalike with an insightful and engaging account of Colonial America that signalsa reset on Colonial studies, the culmination of his work. An important book.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
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“Throughout the book, Mr. Bailyn patiently explains the origins of the people who migrated to America. Readers learn which regions of England, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia produced the most migrants, which social classes were best represented, and the extent to which young males predominated within various migrant flows.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“Bailyn spares no gory detail, but he treats his subjects with sympathy.”
— New Yorker -
“What Bailyn does so well is to not only explain all the action but to pull it into a coherency, a great panoptical dazzle: what motivated people’s actions, how they conducted themselves and why.”
— Christian Science Monitor -
“Bailyn’s most ambitious book.”
— Daily Beast -
“Bailyn has given readers a bracing, unvarnished account of a century that determined what would follow.”
— Richmond Times-Dispatch -
“A highly detailed and meticulously researched account of the first great stage of England’s dominion over North America…The Barbarous Years [is] a cornucopia of human folly, mischief, and intrigue.”
— Washington Independent Review of Books -
“This weighty book distills a lifetime of learning of one of our most authoritative historians of colonial America…A history of the colonies built up of brilliant portraits of the people who interacted in these strange and fearsome lands…This is not your school-book colonial history…Penetrating and stylish…An extraordinary work of profound seriousness, characteristic of its author.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“In Bailyn’s perceptive and erudite hands, the original British, Dutch, and Swedish ventures assume as wild and variegated guises as did the forceful individuals who embarked on them.”
— Booklist -
“Magisterial…Popular histories often gentrify these early events, but Bailyn’s gripping, detailed, often squirm-inducing account makes it abundantly clear how ungenteel they actually were.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“Usually the story of early American history is told in tidy vignettes of homogenous settlers, escaping the bonds of an old world’s stifling intolerance and blazing a linear course toward freedom. Here Bailyn rips away the façade and in the process reveals a world in which the fragility of life and financial devastation were an ever-present reality….Told with a flair that only a master storyteller such as Bailyn can accomplish. The book lends itself well to the audio format in spite of its more than tweny-six-hour span. Henry Strozier’s reading is solid and never gets in the way of Bailyn’s remarkable work of historical achievement. Verdict: Highly recommended to listeners of early American history.”
— Library Journal (starred audio review) -
“Henry Strozier’s deep, authoritative voice fits the tone and the density of this serious, detailed history of the early settling of British North America. His reading is expressive and well modulated to fit the sense of the text, which is enlivened at times by a wry or sarcastic tone. He even emotes and acts when the material permits…A strong, able reading of a predominantly thoughtful and informative text.”
— AudioFile
Awards
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A 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for History
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A 2012 Kansas City Star Top 100 Book for Nonfiction
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A 2012 Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book for Nonfiction
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One of the New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2013
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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 and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Emeritus. He has received many honors for his published work, including Pulitzer Prize Awards, a Bancroft Prize, and a National Book Award. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal.
About Henry Strozier
Henry Strozier is an actor with a forty-year career in numerous movies and television series. Also a voice-over artist, he has worked extensively in video games and audiobook narration, earning several AudioFile Earphones Awards.