The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Bernard Bailyn (1922-2020) was a towering figure in the study of the colonial and revolutionary periods in American history. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice: once in 1968 for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which transformed the historical interpretation of the American Revolution, and again in 1987 for Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America (1986), which expanded the knowledge of immigration in colonial America by utilizing quantitative analysis. Bailyn won the 1975 National Book Award for History with his study of the Loyalist governor of Massachusetts, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974). Other influential books authored by Bailyn include The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955), an innovative collective biography that examined the changing structure of colonial authority; Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (1960), which emphasized the educational role of the family in early America; and The Origins of American Politics (1968), which explained the colonial political background that shaped colonists’ receptivity to radical Whig or Commonwealth ideas.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Williams College in 1945, Bailyn completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1953. At Harvard, Bailyn studied under Perry Miller, a leading scholar of 17th-century New England Puritanism; Samuel Eliot Morison, a noted expert on maritime history; and Oscar Handlin, a renowned pioneer of immigration history.