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Bernard Bailyn's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Bernard Bailyn recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Bernard Bailyn's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Soundings in Atlantic History

Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830

Recommended by Bernard Bailyn, and 1 others.

Bernard BailynIt is an effort to show the underlying structures that unite parts of the Atlantic world, and the intellectual currents that run through all of it. It’s by various historians, and some of the essays are unique, imaginative, and revealing of what unified the Atlantic region below the surface. (Source)

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2

The British Atlantic World, 1500 - 1800

This text was the first edited collection on the burgeoning history of the early modern Atlantic world and has had a huge impact on the many fields of Atlantic Studies. This second edition features two new essays on science and global history respectively, as well as a revised Introduction and updated guides to further reading. less
Recommended by Bernard Bailyn, and 1 others.

Bernard BailynThis is a collection of essays on the British Atlantic world in itself. It goes into excellent detail on many themes. (Source)

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3

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans and involved almost every country with an Atlantic coastline. In this extraordinary book, two leading historians have created the first comprehensive, up-to-date atlas on this 350-year history of kidnapping and coercion. It features nearly 200 maps, especially created for the volume, that explore every detail of the African slave traffic to the New World. The atlas is based on an online database (www.slavevoyages.org) with... more
Recommended by Bernard Bailyn, and 1 others.

Bernard BailynThis book encapsulates a huge amount of scholarship on the slave trade and slavery. The writing on slavery and the slave trade is so immense that it’s almost impossible to grasp it as a whole. David Eltis’s book is actually far more than an atlas – it is a compendium of all of the massive studies of slavery that have been made, many of them by Eltis himself, presented as maps, charts, and the... (Source)

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4
This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus’s arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J.H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America.

Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires’ processes of colonization, the...
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Recommended by Bernard Bailyn, and 1 others.

Bernard BailynThis is a comparative study of the British and Spanish colonial world from 1500 until the end of this 300-year era. John Elliott is a brilliant historian of Spain, and here he turns to New Spain and to the Spanish Atlantic world, comparing it to the British world on major elements. Some parts of it show the congruence between the two, the parallel way they developed. Other parts show the... (Source)

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5
Atlantic history is a newly and rapidly developing field of historical study. Bringing together elements of early modern European, African, and American history--their common, comparative, and interactive aspects--Atlantic history embraces essentials of Western civilization, from the first contacts of Europe with the Western Hemisphere to the independence movements and the globalizing industrial revolution. In these probing essays, Bernard Bailyn explores the origins of the subject, its rapid development, and its impact on historical study.

He first considers Atlantic history as a...
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Recommended by Bernard Bailyn, and 1 others.

Bernard BailynThere are two essays in the book. In the first, I describe the external circumstances, political and cultural, that shaped the historical awareness of the Atlantic world as a subject in itself. The circumstances just before, during and after World War II had a great influence on historians’ thinking about the Atlantic as a region, as did the increased exchanges of scholars among different regions... (Source)

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