My favorite essays in Sometimes An Art are “History and the Creative Imagination” and “The Search for Perfection.” In “History and the Creative Imagination” Bernard Bailyn writes about his favorite contemporary historians: Perry Miller, Charles McLean Andrews, Lewis Namier, and Ronald Syme. After reading this essay, I wanted to drop everything and read the books that Bailyn discusses. “The Search for Perfection” starts with a discussion of one of my favorite writers: Isaiah Berlin. Berlin shows how the imposition of “Utopias” leads to disaster: “the repressive power of the Soviet state, the annihilatory power of the Nazi regime, the mind-blinding power of Maoist gangs, the suffocating power of Islamic fundamentalism”. If you’re in the mood for some brilliant history written by multiple Pulitzer Prize winner Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes An Art will delight you. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Preface

PART ONE
On History and the Struggle to Get It Right

1. Considering the Slave Trade: History and Memory
2. Context in History
3. Three Trends in Modern History
4. History and the Creative Imagination
5. The Losers

PART TWO
Peripheries of the Early British Empire

6. Thomas Hutchinson in Context: The Ordeal Revisited
7. England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America
(co-authored with John Clive)
8. Peopling the Peripheries
9. The Search for Perfection: Atlantic Dimensions

Appendix
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index