The New York Times reports:
Bernard Bailyn, a Harvard scholar whose award-winning books on early American history reshaped the study of the origins of the American Revolution, died on Friday at his home in Belmont, Mass., a suburb of Boston. He was 97.... “He has transformed the field of early American history as much as any single person could,” Gordon S. Wood, a historian at Brown University and a former student of Professor Bailyn’s, said in an interview for this obituary in 2008. “He transformed the history of education. He turned over our entire interpretation of the Revolution. He changed the way we think about immigration. Almost every single thing he did had a profound impact on the field.”
There's more:
He remains best known for “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” published in 1967. It began as a bibliographical essay on hundreds of colonial pamphlets published between 1750 and 1776, which he had been charged with preparing for publication. But it grew into a sweeping study that changed the course of debate about the nation’s founding.
The book, which won both a Pulitzer and the Bancroft Prize, challenged the then-dominant view of Progressive Era historians like Charles Beard, who saw the founders’ revolutionary rhetoric as a mask for economic interests.
For Professor Bailyn, the pamphlets revealed a striking pattern. In his view, though the colonists opposed taxes, restrictions on trade and other economic measures, and were frustrated with their subordinate status in British society, it was a fundamental distrust of government power that led them to throw off the colonial yoke.
The colonists had inherited this ideology from opposition politicians and writers in England, he argued. But it became particularly potent in the relative isolation of the American colonies, where unpopular policies enacted an ocean away were interpreted as signs of a corrupt conspiracy to deny colonists their freedom.
The impact of Professor Bailyn’s book reverberated far beyond colonial history. The historian Forrest McDonald wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1990 that in the two decades after “Ideological Origins” was published, “ideological interpretation of the whole sweep of American history from the 1760s to the 1840s expanded into a veritable cottage industry.”
The death of a great historian.
