Bernard Bailyn

To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, "Fulfillment," as a Postscript. Here he discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution. This detailed study of the persistence of the nation's ideological origins adds a new dimension to the book and projects its meaning forward into vital current concerns.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Presents an account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to the North American British colonies, evaluating its diversity, the survival struggles of immigrants, and their relationships with the indigenous populations of the Eastern seaboard.

The Peopling of British North America - The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

The Barbarous Years

Part One, September 1787-February 1788 (Library of America)

The Debate on the Constitution : Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification 

The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America--The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675

Barbara DeWolfe

Analyzes the movement of English emigrants to North America between 1773 and 1776

A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution

Voyagers to the West

In this introduction to his large-scale work The Peopling of British North America, Bernard Bailyn identifies central themes in a formative passage of our history: the transatlantic transfer of people from the Old World to the North American continent that formed the basis of American society. Voyagers to the West, which covers the British migration in the years just before the American Revolution and is the first major volume in the Peopling project, is also available from Vintage Books.

An Introduction

The Peopling of British North America

Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Drawing on a career spanning more than five decades, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the most respected historians in America presents a new collection of essays that reflect on a lifetime of erudition and accomplishments in history.

Nine Essays on History

Sometimes an Art

Original sources document the ratification of the Constitution, including state debates

Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle Over Ratification

The Debate on the Constitution

"An astonishing range of reading in contemporary tracts and modern authorities is manifest, and many aspects of British and colonial affairs are illuminated. As a political analysis this very important contribution will be hard to refute...." —Frederick B. Tolles, Political Science Quarterly "He produces historical analysis which is as revealing to the political scientist or sociologist as to the historian, of the significance of social and cultural forces on political changes in eighteenth-century America." —John D. Lees, Cambridge University Press "...these well-argued essays represent the first sustained and systematic attempt to provide a comprehensive and integrated analysis of all elements of American political life during the late colonial period...the author has once again put all students concerned with colonial America heavily in his intellectual debt." —Jack P. Greene, The New York Historical Society Quarterly "...Mr. Bailyn brings to his effort a splendid gift for pertinent curiosity. What he has found, and what patterns he has made of his findings, light our way through his longitudes and latitudes of scholarly precision." —Charles Poore, The New York Times

The Origins of American Politics

The brilliance of a master historian shines through this “elegant and engaging memoir” of a lifetime’s work (Richard Aldous, Wall Street Journal). Over a remarkable career Bernard Bailyn has reshaped our understanding of the early American past. Inscribing his superb scholarship with passion and imagination honed by a commitment to rigor, Bailyn captures the particularity of the past and its broad significance in precise, elegant prose. His transformative work has ranged from a new reckoning with the ideology that powered the opposition to British authority in the American Revolution, to a sweeping account of the peopling of America, and the critical nurturing of a new field, the history of the Atlantic world. Illuminating History is the most personal of Bailyn’s works. It is in part an intellectual memoir of the significant turns in an immensely productive and influential scholarly career. It is also alive with people whose actions touched the long arc of history. Among the dramatic human stories that command our attention: a struggling Boston merchant tormented by the tensions between capitalist avarice and a constrictive Puritan piety; an ordinary shopkeeper who in a unique way feverishly condemned British authority as corrupt and unworthy of public confidence; a charismatic German Pietist who founded a cloister in the Pennsylvania wilderness famous for its strange theosophy, its spartan lifestyle, and its rich musical and artistic achievement. And the good townspeople of Petersham, whose response in 1780 to a draft Massachusetts constitution speaks directly to us through a moving insistence on individual freedoms in the face of an imposing central authority. Here is vivid history and an illuminating self-portrait from one of the most eminent historians of our time.

Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades

Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Bernard Bailyn brings us a book that combines portraits of American revolutionaries with a deft exploration of the ideas that moved them and still shape our society today.

Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence

Faces of Revolution

A History of the American People

The Great Republic

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.

Donald Fleming

Adams University Professor Emeritus and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Bernard Bailyn

Europe and America, 1930-1960

The Intellectual Migration

Philip D. Morgan

Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.)

Harry C Black Professor of History Philip D Morgan

A collection of essays dealing with British expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries. An introduction surveys British imperial history, providing a context for the focus on specific ethnic groups--Native Americans, African-Americans, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, and Germans--and how these groups effected British expansion in Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and the West Indies. A conclusion assesses the impact of North American colonies on British society and politics. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Cultural Margins of the First British Empire

Strangers Within the Realm

Patricia L Denault

Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, these innovative essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and commerce, as well as the inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, and the awareness of the Atlantic world in the mind of David Hume.

Soundings in Atlantic History

Shedding new light on British expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this collection of essays examines how the first British Empire was received and shaped by its subject peoples in Scotland, Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean. An introduction surveys British imperial historiography and provides a context for the volume as a whole. The essays focus on specific ethnic groups -- Native Americans, African-Americans, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch and Germans -- and their relations with the British, as well as on the effects of British expansion in particular regions -- Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and the West Indies. A conclusion assesses the impact of the North American colonies on British society and politics. Taken together, these essays represent a new kind of imperial history -- one that portrays imperial expansion as a dynamic process in which the oulying areas, not only the English center, played an important role in the development and character of the Empire. The collection interpets imperial history broadly, examining it from the perspective of common folk as well as elites and discussing the clash of cultures in addition to political disputes. Finally, by examining shifting and multiple frontiers and by drawing parallels between outlying provinces, these essays move us closer to a truly integrated story that links the diverse ethnic experiences of the first British Empire. The contributors are Bernard Bailyn, Philip D. Morgan, Nicholas Canny, Eric Richards, James H. Merrell, A. G. Roeber, Maldwyn A. Jones, Michael Craton, J. M. Bumsted, and Jacob M. Price.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize A compelling, fresh account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard. The immigrants were a mixed multitude. They came from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland, and they moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures. They represented a spectrum of religious attachments. In the early years, their stories are not mainly of triumph but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize situations and recapture lost worlds. It was a thoroughly brutal encounter—not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves, as they sought to control and prosper in the new configurations of life that were emerging around them.

Bernard Bailyn

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