Excerpt from Bernard Bailyn, “Illuminating History”

An addiction to reading

Photo of a young boy reading a book

Bookworms often start young.
Photograph by Fox Photos/Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

 

Adams University professor emeritus Bernard Bailyn, Ph.D. ’53, LL.D. ’99, remains a giant among early-American historians, and among the ranks of Harvard University citizens. Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades (W.W. Norton, $28.95) contains five of his razor-sharp portraits of “small, strange, obscure, but illuminating documents or individuals,” extending from each “datum” to “its meaning for the world at large.” Harvardians may value even more having the texts of his Memorial Minutes for fellow giants Samuel Eliot Morison and Oscar Handlin (see The College Pump, page 64). Historians will value his epilogue on his scholarship, “The Elusive Past.” All readers will cherish the unusually warm, personal introduction, “Entering the Past,” from which this excerpt comes—explaining an education that “began in an addiction I had somehow acquired to reading.”

 

My parents were complicit in this addiction, and they had an expert to advise them. Hartford’s biggest and best bookstore, which once had sold books to Mark Twain, was then owned by a friend of theirs, Israel Witkower, an émigré from Vienna.

He knew about books of all kinds, in several languages, and visiting his store, with its deep central corridor crowded with books, its alcoves, and its jumbled bargain basement, was an adventure.…

History was of no special interest, but I recall two books…that I read before high school and that I later realized were historical in essence. I read and reread them, and I never forgot them. One was a big coffee-table book with a deeply embossed purple cover, published, I think by the Collier’s magazine company, largely consisting of close-up photos of the great men and events of the early twentieth century. The pages were printed in the brownish, “rotogravure” process, but to me they were vivid, and the commentary was readable. The faces of the presidents and other celebrities were intriguing. But it was the battle scenes of World War I that mainly gripped my imagination.…The comments were innocuous, but the scenes were fearful and unforgettable.

The other book of those pre-high-school years that was so memorable and implicitly historical contained a series of comparisons on facing pages of towns in England and in New England that bore the same names. Thus there were photos with comment on the towns of Biddeford, Devon, and Biddeford, Maine; of Bath, Somerset, and Bath, Maine; of Portsmouth, Hampshire, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire; of Newhaven, Sussex, and New Haven, Connecticut; and of Hartford, Hertfordshire, and my own town, Hartford, Connecticut. It was only later that I would understand that these were mainly towns of England’s West Country and south coast, and why their names would have carried over to New England. But it was enough for me, then, to search for the similarities and differences of these towns on either side of the Atlantic, and to puzzle about how that could have come about.

You might also like

Parks and Rec Comedy Writer Aisha Muharrar Gets Serious about Grief

With Loved One, the Harvard grad and Lampoon veteran makes her debut as a novelist.

The Artist Edward Gorey—and Pets—at Harvard

Winter exhibits at Houghton Library   

Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival

Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard.

Most popular

What Trump Means for John Roberts's Legacy

Executive power is on the docket at the Supreme Court.

Three Harvardians win MacArthur Fellowships

A mathematician, a political scientist, and an astrophysicist are honored with “genius” grants for their work.

The Harvard Professor Who Quantified Democracy

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

Explore More From Current Issue

Aerial view of a landscaped area with trees and seating, surrounded by buildings and parking.

Landscape Architect Julie Bargmann Transforming Forgotten Urban Sites

Julie Bargmann and her D.I.R.T. Studio give new life to abandoned mines, car plants, and more.

A woman (Julia Child) struggles to carry a tall stack of books while approaching a building.

Highlights from Harvard’s Past

The rise of Cambridge cyclists, a lettuce boycott, and Julia Child’s cookbooks

Six women interact in a theatrical setting, one seated and being comforted by others.

A (Truly) Naked Take on Second-Wave Feminism

Playwright Bess Wohl’s Liberation opens on Broadway.