Bernard Bailyn
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Bernard Bailyn (b. 1922, Hartford, Connecticut) is an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He has been a professor at Harvard since 1953. Bailyn has won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice (in 1968 and 1987). In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.[1] He changed the way many people think about the American Revolution.
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[edit] Education
In 1945 he earned his bachelors degree from Williams College,in 1953 Bernard Bailyn earned his Ph.D from Harvard University, and has been associated with the University ever since. As a graduate student at Harvard, Bailyn studied under Perry Miller, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Oscar Handlin. He was made a full professor in 1961, and professor emeritus in 1993.
[edit] History books
Bernard Bailyn is the author of:
- The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955)
- Massachusetts Shipping, 1697-1714 (with Lotte Bailyn 1959)
- Education in the Forming of American Society (1960)
- The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in 1968
- The Origins of American Politics (1968)
- The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974), which was awarded the National Book Award in History in 1975
- The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1986)
- Voyagers to the West (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, and distinguished book awards from the Society of Colonial Wars and the Society of the Cincinnati
- Faces of Revolution (1990)
- On the Teaching and Writing of History (1994)
- To Begin the World Anew (2003)
- Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (2005).
He is also the editor of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, the first volume of which, published in 1965, was awarded the Faculty Prize of the Harvard University Press for that year, and editor of The Apologia of Robert Keayne (1965) and the two-volume Debate on the Constitution (1993).
He co-authored The Great Republic (1977), an American history textbook; and was co-editor of The Intellectual Migration, Europe and America, 1930-1960 (1969), Law in American History (1972), The Press and the American Revolution (1980), and Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (1991; see [1]).
[edit] Major themes and new ideas
He is known for meticulous research and for interpretations that sometimes challenge the conventional wisdom, especially those dealing with the causes and effects of the American Revolution. In his most influential work, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bailyn exhibits through a thorough analysis of pre-Revolutionary political pamphlets that the colonists believed that the British were intending on establishing a tyrannical state in the colonies that would abridge the historical rights of the colonists. He thus argued that the Revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and freedom was not simply propagandistic but rather central to their understanding of their situation. This evidence was used to displace Charles Beard's theory, then the dominant understanding of the American Revolution, that the American Revolution was primarily a matter of class warfare and that the rhetoric of liberty was meaningless. Bailyn maintained that ideology was ingrained in the revolutionaries, an attitude he said exemplified the "transforming radical libertarianism" of the American Revolution.[2]
Bailyn argued that republicanism was at the core of the values Americans fought for. He located the intellectual sources of the American Revolution within a broader British political framework, explaining how English country Whig ideas about civic virtue, corruption, ancient rights, rights and fear of autocracy were, in the colonies, transformed into the ideology of republicanism.
To quote Bailyn,
The modernization of American Politics and government during and after the Revolution took the form of a sudden, radical realization of the program that had first been fully set forth by the opposition intelligentsia…in the reign of George the First. Where the English opposition, forcing its way against a complacent social and political order, had only striven and dreamed, Americans driven by the same aspirations but living in a society in many ways modern, and now released politically, could suddenly act. Where the English opposition had vainly agitated for partial reforms…American leaders moved swiftly and with little social disruption to implement systematically the outermost possibilities of the whole range of radically liberation ideas.
In the process they…infused into American political culture…the major themes of eighteenth-century radical libertarianism brought to realization here. The first is the belief that power is evil, a necessity perhaps but an evil necessity; that it is infinitely corrupting; and that it must be controlled, limited, restricted in every way compatible with a minimum of civil order. Written constitutions; the separation of powers; bills of rights; limitations on executives, on legislatures, and courts; restrictions on the right to coerce and wage war—all express the profound distrust of power that lies at the ideological heart of the American Revolution and that has remained with us as a permanent legacy ever after. (Bernard Bailyn, "The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation," in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 26–27.)
In the 1980s, Bailyn turned from political and intellectual history to social and demographic history. His histories of the peopling of colonial North America explored questions of immigration, cultural contact, and settlement that his mentor Handlin had pioneered decades earlier. More recently, Bailyn has explored the history of the Atlantic world. Since 1995, Bailyn has organized an annual international seminar at Harvard designed to promote scholarship in this emerging field ([3]).
[edit] Ph.D. students
Former students of Bailyn include Pulitzer Prize winners Michael Kammen, Jack N. Rakove and Gordon S. Wood as well as Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Beth Norton. Other notable Bailyn students include:
- Professor Retha Warnicke;
- Peter H. Wood (Black Majority);
- Michael Zuckerman (Peaceable Kingdoms);
- Pauline Maier (American Scripture);
- James Henretta (Families and farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America);
- David Gollaher (Voice for the Mad) which won the Organization of American Historians Avery O. Craven Prize;
- prolific legal historian Peter Charles Hoffer (Law and People in Colonial America, among others);
- Fred Anderson (Crucible of War and A People's Army);
- Virginia DeJohn Anderson (Creatures of Empire);
- and Bancroft Prize winners Robert Gross, Edward Countryman, and Richard L. Bushman.
Many of these historians have gone on to train a new generation of American historians; others have branched out into fields as diverse as law and the history of science.
[edit] Bibliography
- Jack N. Rakove, "Bernard Bailyn" in Robert Allen Rutland, ed. "Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000" U of Missouri Press. (2000) pp 5-22
[edit] Additional books by Bailyn
- Bailyn, Bernard, ed. The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle for Ratification. Part One: September 1787 to February 1788 (The Library of America, 1993) ISBN 0-940450-42-9
- Bailyn, Bernard, ed. The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle for Ratification. Part Two: January to August 1788 (The Library of America, 1993) ISBN 0-940450-64-X
- Atlantic history: concept and contours Harvard University Press, 2005
- Education in the forming of American society; needs and opportunities for study Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press 1960
- Faces of revolution: personalities and themes in the struggle for American independence Knopf 1990.
- The Great republic: a history of the American people Little, Brown, 1977; coauthored college textbook; several editions
- The ideological origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1967.
- Massachusetts shipping, 1697-1714; a statistical study, Harvard University Press, 1959.
- The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century. Harvard University Press, 1955.
- The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. Harvard University Press, 1974.
- The origins of American politics. Knopf, 1968.
- Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750-1776, edited by Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University Press, 1965
- The peopling of British North America: an introduction Knopf, 1986.
- To begin the world anew: the genius and ambiguities of the American founders Knopf 2003
- Voyagers to the West: a passage in the peopling of America on the eve of the Revolution Knopf 1986.
[edit] References
- ^ Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
[edit] External links
- About Bernard Bailyn Harvard biography page.
- "To Begin the World Anew"-Politics and the Creative Imagination Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Bernard Bailyn: An Appreciation
- Bibliography
- Considering the Slave Trade: History and Memory
- History News Network
