Bernard Bailyn – författare

The fiftieth-anniversary edition of the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize-winning classic. “One cannot claim to understand the Revolution without having read this book.” —New York Times Book Review“[This book] influenced an entire generation of historians. For many, it remains the most persuasive interpretation of the Revolution.” —Gordon S. Wood, Wall Street Journal Awarded both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft prizes, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution has become a classic of American historical literature. Hailed at its first appearance as “the most brilliant study of the meaning of the Revolution to appear in a generation,” it was enlarged in a second edition to include the nationwide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, hence exploring not only the Founders’ initial hopes and aspirations but also their struggle to implement their ideas in constructing the national government. In a preface he wrote for this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Bernard Bailyn reconsidered key features of the book and highlighted the Founders’ profound concern with power. In pamphlets, letters, newspapers, and sermons, they returned again and again to the problem of the uses and misuses of power—the great benefits of power when gained and used by popular consent and the political and social devastation when acquired by those who seize it by force or other means and use it for their personal benefit. This fiftieth-anniversary edition has been welcomed by readers long familiar with Bailyn’s work and has introduced a new generation to a study that remains required reading for anyone seeking to understand the nation’s historical roots.

Over a remarkable career Bernard Bailyn has reshaped our understanding of the early American past. Inscribing his superb scholarship with passion and imagination honed by a commitment to rigour, Bailyn captures the particularity of the past and its broad significance in precise, elegant prose. His transformative work has ranged from a new reckoning with the ideology that powered the opposition to British authority in the American Revolution to a sweeping account of the peopling of America and the critical nurturing of a new field, the history of the Atlantic world.Illuminating History is the most personal of Bailyn’s works. It is in part an intellectual memoir of the significant turns in an immensely productive and influential scholarly career. It is also alive with people whose actions touched the long arc of history. Among the dramatic human stories that command our attention: a struggling Boston merchant tormented by the tensions between capitalist avarice and a constrictive Puritan piety; an ordinary shopkeeper who in a unique way feverishly condemned British authority as corrupt and unworthy of public confidence; a charismatic German Pietist who founded a cloister in the Pennsylvania wilderness famous for its strange theosophy, its spartan lifestyle, and its rich musical and artistic achievement. And the good townspeople of Petersham, whose response in 1780 to a draft Massachusetts constitution speaks directly to us through a moving insistence on individual freedoms in the face of an imposing central authority. Here is vivid history and an illuminating self-portrait from one of the most eminent historians of our time.

Atlantic history is a newly and rapidly developing field of historical study. Bringing together elements of early modern European, African, and American history--their common, comparative, and interactive aspects--Atlantic history embraces essentials of Western civilization, from the first contacts of Europe with the Western Hemisphere to the independence movements and the globalizing industrial revolution. In these probing essays, Bernard Bailyn explores the origins of the subject, its rapid development, and its impact on historical study.He first considers Atlantic history as a subject of historical inquiry--how it evolved as a product of both the pressures of post-World War II politics and the internal forces of scholarship itself. He then outlines major themes in the subject over the three centuries following the European discoveries. The vast contribution of the African people to all regions of the West, the westward migration of Europeans, pan-Atlantic commerce and its role in developing economies, racial and ethnic relations, the spread of Enlightenment ideas--all are Atlantic phenomena.In examining both the historiographical and historical dimensions of this developing subject, Bailyn illuminates the dynamics of history as a discipline.

These innovative essays probe the underlying unities that bound the early modern Atlantic world into a regional whole and trace some of the intellectual currents that flowed through the lives of the people of the four continents. Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, the essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and of commerce, legal and illegal, inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, the Protestant international that linked Boston and pietist Germany, and the awareness and meaning of the Atlantic world in the mind of that preeminent intellectual and percipient observer, David Hume.In his Introduction, Bailyn explains that the Atlantic world was never self-enclosed or isolated from the rest of the globe but suggests that experiences in the early modern Atlantic region were distinctive in ways that shaped the course of world history.

Winner of the National Book AwardThe classic political biography that reimagined Revolutionary history—in a new edition to honor America’s 250th year.Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts Bay during the restive years of 1771–1774, was the most distinguished colonial-born official in pre-Revolutionary America. He was also the most loathed. A loyalist, Hutchinson defended the legitimacy of Parliament’s rule and suffered the consequences, bearing the full weight of Patriot ire. By the eve of the Revolution, he was vilified as the man most responsible for Britain’s intolerable cruelties—not only a tyrant but a traitor.The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson is Bernard Bailyn’s National Book Award–winning history of Hutchinson and the American loyalists who found themselves on the losing side of the Revolutionary War. Offering a dramatic account of the origins of American independence from the viewpoint of one of its most thoughtful opponents, Bailyn makes the loyalist position comprehensible and rehabilitates a deft statesman who was far from the demagogue imagined in Patriot propaganda. Hutchinson in fact shared many Patriot grievances and faithfully represented colonial public opinion to both Crown and Parliament. Yet he was forced from office and died in exile, broken and longing for his native New England.Through a sympathetic yet balanced portrayal of one of the Revolution’s defeated voices, Bailyn reveals with singular clarity why the Revolution prevailed and how those who survived its upheaval came to grasp its transformative power. Published on the 250th anniversary of American independence, with a foreword from Maya Jasanoff, this new edition of Bailyn’s masterpiece marks a turning point in historiography, illuminating the overlooked dimensions of American history and the stories that shape nations.

This happy combination of literary essay and exceptionally well-written history, providing insights into a past still important in the twentieth century, will quickly take an honored place on the shelves of Harvardiana.Bernard Bailyn writes on the origins of Harvard and the foundations of Harvard’s persistent character, structure, and style of governance, and contributes another chapter on the unhappy ending to the administration of the beloved President Kirkland, who presided over but could not control a period of profound change. Oscar Handlin describes the shifting relationships and power struggles among faculty, administration, and students over the years (“Making Men of the Boys”) and Harvard’s evolution from an ingrown community of teachers and students into a large, complex institution with worldwide prestige. Donald Fleming has chapters on the presidency of Charles William Eliot (“the greatest man in the history of Harvard”) and the colorful personalities of Harvard (not only “Copey” and Santayana and Charles Eliot Norton, but also “Old Sophy,” who kept a pet chicken in his room in Holworthy). Stephan Thernstrom examines the growing diversity of the student body as to finances, geography, religion, and racial background from the eighteenth century to the 1980s.The subjects are of continuing interest not only to members of the Harvard community, who will treasure this memento of Harvard’s 350th anniversary, but also to historians of higher education and ordinary readers, who will enjoy the new information, original personalities, and thoughtful perspectives the book offers.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the merchants were dominant figures in the northern American colonies, powerful economically, politically, and socially. But in New England this preeminence had not been present in the first years of settlement; it had been achieved in the course of three generations of social development as the merchants often Puritans themselves, rose within the Bible Commonwealths to challenge the domination of the Puritan fathers.In lively detail Mr. Bailyn here presents the struggle of the merchants to achieve full social recognition as their successes in trade and in such industries as fishing and lumbering offered them avenues to power. Surveying the rise of merchant families, he offers a portrait in depth of the emergence of a new social group whose interests and changing social position powerfully affected the developing character of American society.The story of this group is the story of people and of their many–sided interests. The merchants were united by the demands of their common devotion to trade, yet they did not form a socially homogeneous unit. In fact their social differences—created in the confusions and dislocations of the early days of settlement came to play an important role in their business and political activities. Moreover, their commercial ventures, successes, and failures affected their social and political situation. Internationalists by occupation, they were deeply affected by personal relations with Europeans as well as by events in the Old World.Drawing on source material from many fields—business records, religious and political data, literary remains, and genealogical information—Mr. Bailyn has discovered much that is new about the merchants, and has brought it all together into a composite portrait of our economic founding fathers that is fascinating in itself and that will reorient our thinking about many aspects of early New England history.

“This book,” Bernard Bailyn writes, “depicts the fortunes of a conservative in a time of radical upheaval and deals with problems of public disorder and ideological commitment.” It is at the same time a dramatic account of the origins of the American Revolution from the viewpoint, not of the winners who became the Founding Fathers, but of the losers, the Loyalists. By portraying the ordeal of the last civilian royal governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Bailyn explains “what the human reality was against which the victors struggled” and in doing so makes the story of the Revolution fuller and more comprehensible.

This is the first volume of a four-volume set that will reprint in their entirety the texts of 72 pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American controversy that were published in America in the years 1750–1776. They have been selected from the corpus of the pamphlet literature on the basis of their importance in the growth of American political and social ideas, their role in the debate with England over constitutional rights, and their literary merit. All of the best known pamphlets of the period, such as James Otis’s Rights of the British Colonies (1764), John Dickinson’s Farmer’s Letters (1768), and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) are to be included. In addition there are lesser known ones particularly important in the development of American constitutional thought: Stephen Johnson’s Some Important Observations (1766), John Joachim Zubly’s An Humble Enquiry (1769), Ebenezer Baldwin’s An Appendix Stating the Heavy Grievances (1774), and Four Letters on Interesting Subjects (1776). There are also pamphlets illustrative of the sheer vituperation of the Revolutionary polemics, and others selected for their more elevated literary merit. Both sides of the Anglo-American dispute and all genres of expression—poetry, dramatic dialogues, sermons, treatises, documentary collections, political “position papers”—that appeared in this form are included.Each pamphlet is introduced by an essay written by the editor containing a biographical sketch of the author of the document, an analysis of the circumstances that led to the writing of it, and an interpretation of its contents. The texts are edited for the convenience of the modern reader according to a scheme that preserves scrupulously the integrity of every word written but that frees the text from the encumbrances of eighteenth-century printing practices. All references to writings, people, and events that are not obvious to the informed modern reader are identified in the editorial apparatus and where necessary explained in detailed notes.This first volume of the set contains the texts of 14 pamphlets through the year 1765. It presents, in addition, a book-length General Introduction by Bernard Bailyn on the ideology of the American Revolution. In the seven chapters of this essay the ideological origins and development of the Revolutionary movement are analyzed in the light of the study of the pamphlet literature that went into the preparation of these volumes. Bailyn explains that close analysis of this literature allows one to penetrate deeply into the colonists’ understanding of the events of their time; to grasp more clearly than is otherwise possible the sources of their ideas and their motives in rebelling; and, above all, to see the subtle, fundamental transformation of eighteenth-century constitutional thought that took place during these years of controversy and that became basic doctrine in America thereafter.Bailyn stresses particularly the importance in the development of American thought of the writings of a group of early eighteenth-century English radicals and opposition politicians who transmitted to the colonists most directly the seventeenth-century tradition of anti-authoritarianism born in the upheaval of the English Civil War. In the context of this seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century tradition one sees the political importance in the Revolutionary movement of concepts the twentieth century has generally dismissed as mere propaganda and rhetoric: “slavery,” “conspiracy,” “corruption.” It was the meaning these concepts imparted to the events of the time, Bailyn suggests, as well as the famous Lockean notions of natural rights and social and governmental compacts, that accounts for the origins and the basic characteristics of the American Revolution.

In a pungent revision of the professional educator's school of history, Bailyn traces the cultural context of education in early American society and the evolution of educational standards in the colonies. His analysis ranges beyond formal education to encompass such vital social determinants as the family, apprenticeship, and organized religion.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.