Voyagers to the West

"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."