Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution

by Bernard Bailyn

Overview

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Saloutos Prize of the Immigration History Society

Bailyn's Pulitzer Prize-winning book uses an emigration roster that lists every person officially known to have left Britain for America from December 1773 to March 1776 to reconstruct the lives and motives of those who emigrated to the New World.

"Voyagers to the West is a superb book...It should be equally admired by and equally attractive to the general reader as to the professional historian."--R.C. Simmons, Journal of American Studies

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307798527
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/03/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	720
Sales rank:	532,749
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Bernard Bailyn is Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Emeritus at Harvard University. He founded, and for many years directed, the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, which helped to reorient the study of the Atlantic region in the early modern era. His books include 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; Atlantic History: Concept and Contours; The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675, and Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History.

Editorial Reviews

Bailyn's superbly documented history advances our knowledge of the migration of English and Scottish laborers and farmers from their native soil to wilderness colonial America. Researching this study for 10 years, Bailyn, a Pulitzer and Bancroft prize-winner for Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, with this new book is now well advanced into his Peopling of America series. This indefatigable historian is the first to achieve a full-scale follow-through on a remarkable London Register naming every person known to have left Britain for North America between December 1773 and March 1776. From town records, letters and contemporary newspapers, Bailyn describes dangerous ship-passages and arrivals of thousands of Scots, Yorkshiremen and Londoners in Nova Scotia, Carolina, Georgia, Florida and even the Gulf-Delta area. Focusing on rich British-Scots entrepreneurs, he describes one of the great land-grabs of historyand more than incidentally shows why the ``indentured servant'' aspect of this feverish migration petered out, to be replaced by black slavery. Illustrations not seen by PW. (October 31)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The ``key'' to this work is Bailyn's identification of dual migration and settlement patternsone for families and another for single men and indentured servants. Relying on a British emigration register, 1773-76, and myriad ``ancillary sources,'' Bailyn's is a masterful treatment of the ``human meaning'' of the transatlantic migration. By turns, he employs descriptive exposition, quantification, structural analysis, narrative accounts of many individuals and families, and graphic representations (including a novel portfolio of ``portraits and scenes'' of runaway servants, based on newspaper accounts). Part of a multivolume study that began with The Peopling of British North America: an introduction ( LJ 8/86), this is very highly recommended for most libraries. Roy H. Tryon, Delaware State Archives, Dover

Library Journal

"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."

From the Publisher