Bernard Bailyn was the author of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1968. He was the editor of The Apologia of Robert Keayne (1965) and of 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).
Major themes and ideas
Bailyn's dissertation and first publications dealt with New Englandmerchants. He argued that international commerce was an uncertain business, given the high risk of losses at sea in the very long turnaround times meant that information was often too old to be useful. Merchants reduced the uncertainty by pooling their resources, especially with marriages to other merchant families, and placing their kinfolk as trusted agents in London and other foreign ports.
International commerce became a chief means of growing rich in colonial Massachusetts. However, there was an ongoing tension between the entrepreneurial spirit on the one hand and traditional Puritan culture on the other. The world of merchants became an engine of social change, undermining the isolationism, scholasticism, and religious zeal of the Puritan leadership. Bailyn pointed the younger generation of historians away from Puritan theology and toward broader social and economic forces. Bailyn expanded his research to the social structure of Virginia, showing how its leadership class was transformed in the 1660s. Like Edmund Morgan at Brown University and Yale, Bailyn emphasized the multiple roles of the family in the colonial social system.[8]
Bailyn 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 analyzed pre-Revolutionary political pamphlets to show that colonists believed the British intended to establish a tyrannical state that would abridge the historical British rights. He thus argued that the Revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and freedom was not simply propagandistic but rather central to their understanding of the situation. This evidence was used to displace Charles A. 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 radicalism of the American Revolution."[9]
Bailyn argued that republicanism was at the core of the values French radical thinkers had striven to affirm. 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, and fear of autocracy were, in the colonies, transformed into the ideology of republicanism.
According to 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 French 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 libertarian 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; bill 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.[10]
In Bailyn's assessment, contested libertarian meanings change through time as "the colonists" struggled to define, and to pursue, the property of independence. Recent historians hold that more than any other "colonist," Boston waterfront rebels channeled their "cosmopolitanism into a belief that 'the cause of America' was a libertarian 'cause for all mankind."[11]
Two Concepts of Liberty
In her memorial tribute, Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin noted Bernard Bailyn's resistance to "dichotomies" and his attention to "granular" records and culture.[12] In that context, Bailyn did not publish on political philosopher Isaiah Berlin until a 2006 assessment of "perfectionist ideas" found in "Two Concepts of Liberty." He contended that Berlin's framework for "liberty" was "formally cast as a discourse on the permissible limits of coercion; 'force' and 'constraint" are repeatedly referred to, and Berlin denied that all historical conflicts are reducible to conflicts of ideas." Berlin's "comments on the dangers of perfectionism had begun with his discussion of positive liberty...While at times, he then wrote, it might be justifiable 'to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health), which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue,' once one claims that one knows what others need better than they know it themselves, one is 'in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies.' " Bailyn triangulated his own approach with Berlin's "embattled position in defense of a liberal alternative" and "perfectionist ideas." For the latter, Bailyn distinguished his approach to "liberty" from the "unity" precepts of Actual idealism in Totalitarianism. Thus he decried "the repressive power of the Soviet state, the annihilatory power of the Nazi regime, the mind-blinding power of Maoist gangs, [and] the suffocating power of Islamic fundamentalism." He declared that "no one knew better than Berlin or expressed more brilliantly the genealogy and structure of perfectionist ideas. But their threat to civilisation, in the most general terms, lay not in their intrinsic malevolence but in the brutality of those who implacably imposed them: the populist thugs, the fanatical monopolists of power."[13]
Social history
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.
[Bailyn] is very clearly a believer in the distinctiveness of American civilization. Although he rarely, if ever, uses the phrase "American exceptionalism," he repeatedly insists upon the "distinctive characteristics of British North American life." He has argued...that the process of social and cultural transmission resulted in peculiarly American patterns of education (in the broadest sense of the word); and he believes in the unique character of the American Revolution.[14]
Atlantic history
As a leading advocate of Atlantic history, Bailyn organized an annual international seminar on the "History of the Atlantic World" from the mid-1980s onward. Through the seminar, he promoted social and demographic studies, especially regarding flows of population into colonial America.[15] Bailyn's Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (2005) explores the borders and contents of the emerging field, which emphasizes cosmopolitan and multicultural elements that have tended to be neglected or considered in isolation by traditional historiography dealing with the Americas.
Richard D. Brown (Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 and Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865);
David Hancock (historian) ("Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste," "Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785)
James Henretta (Families and farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America);
George David Smith (practitioner of applied economic and business history and founding partner of The Winthrop Group, Inc. Anatomy of a Business Strategy" [Co-winner: Best book on Business and Industry, American Publishers' Assn.]; "From Monopoly to Competition;" "The New Financial Capitalists, with George Baker; History of The Firm [McKinsey & Co.], lead author,
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.
Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence. Knopf, 1990.
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. Library of America, 1993. ISBN978-0-940450-42-4
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. Library of America, 1993. ISBN978-0-940450-64-6
On the Teaching and Writing of History. 1994.
— (March 1996). "Context in History". History. Quadrant. 40 (3): 9–15.[24]
To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders. Knopf, 2003.
Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Harvard University Press, 2005.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, ISBN978-0-394-51570-0.
Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015, ISBN978-1-101-87447-9.
Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades, Norton, 2020.
^ abA. Roger Ekirch, "Bernard Bailyn," in Clyde N. Wilson, ed. Twentieth-century American Historians (Gale Research Company, 1983) pp 19–26
^Bailyn, The ideological origins of the American Revolution (1992 edition) Page v
^Bernard Bailyn, "The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation," in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (1960), pp. 26–27.
^Carp, Benjamin L. (2007). Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution. Oxford. p. 61. ISBN9780195378559.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Bailyn, Bernard (2006). "The Search for Perfection: Atlantic Dimensions". Proceedings of the British Academy. 151: 139 and 157–158.
^Michael Kammen and Stanley N. Katz, "Bernard Bailyn, Historian, and Teacher: An Appreciation." in James A. Henretta, Michael Kämmen, and Stanley N. Katz, eds. The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology (1991) p 10.
^Edited version of the 1995 Charles La Trobe Lecture.
Further reading
Boyd, Kelly, ed. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writers (Rutledge, 1999) 1:66–68.
Coclanis, Peter A. "Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History." Journal of World History 13.1 (2002): 169–182.
Ekirch, A. Roger "Bernard Bailyn," in Clyde N. Wilson, ed. Twentieth-century American Historians (Gale Research Company, 1983) pp 19–26
Kammen, Michael and Stanley N. Katz, "Bernard Bailyn, Historian, and Teacher: An Appreciation." in James A. Henretta, Michael Kämmen, and Stanley N. Katz, eds. The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology (1991) pp 3–15
Rakove, Jack N. "'How Else Could It End?' Bernard Bailyn and the Problem of Authority and Early America." in James A. Henretta, Michael Kämmen, and Stanley N. Katz, eds. The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology (1991) pp 51–69
Rakove, Jack N. "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.
Wood, Gordon. "The creative imagination of Bernard Bailyn," in James A. Henretta, Michael Kämmen, and Stanley N. Katz, eds. The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology (1991) pp 16–50.
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