By conquering and prospering, their children and grandchildren became tough individualists endowed with a new set of American values. Pitted on the frontier against Indians, the newcomers struggled to master a fertile and abundant land. But they encountered a strange and wild land of menace, challenge, and opportunity. In the colonial beginning, traditional Europeans sailed westward determined to replicate the hierarchical institutions and late medieval values of their origins.

Never so crass, Bailyn subscribes instead to the scholarly variant of exceptionalism that describes a process of historical development. This notion of a democratic transformation has deep roots in American culture. In a long and productive scholarly career, he has worked steadily within the interpretive bounds of “American Exceptionalism.” Last year that phrase erupted into the Republican primary debates as Newt Gingrich cast American Exceptionalism as the true national faith, and demonized President Obama as a heretic prone to regard other national cultures as worthy of respect. Gingrich’s populist version celebrates America as exceptional in its devotion to liberty and endowed with a providential mission to lead and preach to the unfortunate people condemned to live elsewhere. Few historians are as accomplished or as consistent as Bernard Bailyn, the Adams University professor emeritus at Harvard University and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for American history.

The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn