Bernard Bailyn

"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 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."--Jacket.

With these character sketches of key figures of the American Revolution and illuminating probes of its circumstances, Bernard Bailyn reveals the ambiguities, complexities, and uncertainties of the founding generation as well as their achievements. Using visual documentation—portraits, architecture, allegorical engravings—as well as written sources, Bailyn, one of our most esteemed historians, paints a complex picture of that distant but still remarkably relevant world. He explores the powerfully creative effects of the Founders' provincialism and lays out in fine detail the mingling of gleaming utopianism and tough political pragmatism in Thomas Jefferson's public career, and the effect that ambiguity had on his politics, political thought, and present reputation. And Benjamin Franklin emerges as a figure as cunning in his management of foreign affairs and of his visual image as he was amiable, relaxed, and amusing in his social life. Bailyn shows, too, why it is that the Federalist papers—polemical documents thrown together frantically, helter-skelter, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in a fierce pohtical batde two hundred years ago—have attained canonical status, not only as a penetrating analysis of the American Constitution but as a timeless commentary on the nature of politics and constitutionalism. Professor Bailyn concludes, in a wider perspective, with an effort to locate the effect of the Founders' imaginative thought on political reformers throughout the Atlantic world. Precisely how their principles were received abroad, Bailyn writes, is as ambiguous as the personalities of the remarkably creative provincials who founded the American nation. From the dust jacket.

From an acclaimed historian of early America, a compelling account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to the British colonies of North America and their involvements with each other and the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard.

This book focuses on the beginnings of the peopling of America, from 1500 to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, taking into account such aspects as settlement, social patterns, and groups and races.

“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 book has developed from a study that was first undertaken a number of years ago, when Howard Mumford Jones, then editor-in-chief of the John Harvard Library, invited me to prepare a collection of pamphlets of the American Revolution for publication in that series. The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred. In the end I concluded that no fewer than seventy-two of them ought to be re-published. But sheer numbers were not the most important measure of the magnitude of the project. The pamphlets include all sorts of writings -- treatises on political theory, essays on history, political arguments, sermons, correspondence, poems -- and they display all sorts of literary devices. But for all their variety they have in common one distinctive characteristic: they are, to an unusual degree, explanatory. They reveal not merely positions taken but the reasons why positions were taken; they review motive and understanding: the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas -- the articulated worldview -- that lay behind the manifest events of the time. As a result I found myself, as I read through these many documents, studying not simply a particular medium of publication but, through these documents, nothing less than the ideological origins of the American Revolution. - Foreword.

Based on thesis--Harvard University. Includes bibliographical references.

"From one of the most respected historians in America, twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a new collection of essays that reflect a lifetime of erudition and accomplishments in history. The past has always been elusive: how can we understand people whose worlds were utterly different from our own without imposing our own standards and hindsight? What did things feel like in the moment when outcomes were uncertain? How can we recover the uncertainties of the past, before the outcomes were known? What kind of imagination goes into the writing of transformative history? Are there latent trends that distinguish the kinds of history we now write? How unique was North America among the far-flung peripheries of the early British empire? As Bernard Bailyn argues in this elegant, deeply informed collection of essays, history always combines approximations based on incomplete data, with empathic imagination and the interweaving of strands of knowledge into a narrative which also explains. This is a stirring and insightful work drawing on the wisdom and perspective of a career spanning more than five decades--a book that will appeal to anyone interested in history"--From publisher's website.

From the Foreword: This book of essays on the activities, place, and influence of American printers and journalists during the period of our Revolution is the American Antiquarian Society's primary scholarly contribution to the two hundredth anniversary of that pivotal process. Since its founding in 1812 by Isaiah Thomas, one of the leading journalists of the Revolutionary era, the American Antiquarian Society has expended a very large portion of its energies upon the collection, recording, and dissemination of the fundamental printed records of the American Revolution-its precursing events and its aftermath. The Society has done so in the strong belief that the influence of those who controlled the printed word were the persons crucial to the formation of a revolution within the minds of Americans, as well as to the act of overt revolt. Thus, the history of the Society is inextricably linked with the American press and with the American Revolution and has resulted in our enduring interest in the history of printing and publishing of the country. Thomas, himself, established this focus his own lifetime, for his narrative of the contribution of American printers to the development of our cultural life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is, after 167 years, still informative, and it remains in print. Thomas also compiled the first list of American imprints of the colonial period, which was edited and published by the Society in 1874. Succeeding Society members and staff have followed our founder by actively enlarging knowledge of the American printed record and, through its interpretation, expanding our understanding of American history and culture. Thus, this book of essays falls squarely within the traditional concerns of the Society and we trust it serves to deepen our understanding of the role of the printers during the Revolution. Isaiah Thomas provides a link between the press, the Revolution, and this Society, a link that may serve to introduce this volume.