Bernard Bailyn
Bernard Bailyn (
1922 — ) is an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial History. He has been a professor at
Harvard since 1953, and has won the
Pulitzer Prize for History twice (in
1968 and
1987).
Bailyn was born in
Hartford, Connecticut in 1922. In 1953 he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, 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.
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), and
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 is a co-author of
The Great Republic (1977), an American history textbook; and 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).(http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/bailyn.html)
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 particular, he identified
republicanism as 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. Bailyn is most recently known for his contributions to the field of Atlantic world history. Since 1995, Bailyn has organized an annual international seminar at Harvard designed to promote scholarship in this field.
Former students of Bailyn's include
Pulitzer Prize winners
Jack N. Rakove and
Gordon S. Wood as well as Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Beth Norton. Other notable Bailyn students include Gary B. Nash (
The Urban Crucible), Michael Zuckerman (
Peaceable Kingdoms), Pauline Maier (
American Scripture), James Henretta (
Families and farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America), Michael Kammen (
The Mystic Chords of Memory), the prolific legal historian, Peter Charles Hoffer (
Law and People in Colonial America, among numerous others), and
Bancroft Prize winners Robert Gross, Edward Countryman, and Richard L. Bushman. Each of these historians has gone on to train a new generation of colonial American historians in the nation's elite university departments of history.
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
* 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 0940450429
* 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 094045064X
*
Rakove
