A Nasty New World « The Dish - 0 views
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Bernard Bailyn The Barbarous Years, which details the “little-remembered” brutality of life in the American colonies during the 17th century:
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Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being “flayed alive” means?
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yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture,
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