WHATEVER deficiencies Bernard Bailyn may have had, reticence about the practice of history, fortunately, was not one of them.1 During five decades as a teacher at Harvard, he devoted his research seminar in Early American history to introducing first-year graduate students to the discipline's essential skills and practices. Simultaneously he instructed scores of individual doctoral candidates in matters of research, argument, and writing whenever their drafts diverged from his acute sense of the relevant standards. Between 1951 and 2000, he performed a similar service for authors and scholarly readers in the incisive book reviews and review essays he published in learned journals, delivering thirty verdicts on works from La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II—a critical debut as auspicious as it was audacious—to the first two volumes of The Oxford History of the British Empire, the subject of his last review.2
In seminars,...