The late Bernard Bailyn, former AHA president, was featured in the November 11 edition of Peter Coy’s New York Times newsletter. For the “Quote of the Day,” Coy chose a passage from Bailyn’s presidential address at the 1981 AHA annual meeting in Los Angeles: “The historian must retell, with a new richness, the story of what some one of the worlds of the past was, how it ceased to be what it was, how it faded and blended into new configurations, how at every stage what was, was the product of what had been and developed into what no one could have anticipated. All of this to help us understand how we came to be the way we are and to extend the poor reach of our own immediate experience.”
