Books by Bernard Bailyn

The brilliance of a master historian shines through this personal account of a lifetime's work.

In a pungent revision of the professional educator's school of history, Bailyn traces the cultural context of education in early American society and the evolution of educational standards in the colonies. His analysis ranges beyond formal education to encompass such vital social determinants as the family, apprenticeship, and organised religion.

Drawing on such source materials as business records, religious and political data, literary remains, and genealogical information, Bailyn has discovered much that is new about the merchants, and has brought it together into a portrait of our economic founding fathers that will reorient our thinking about many aspects of early New England 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 Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is a classic of American historical literature-required reading for understanding the Founders' ideas and their struggles to implement them. In the preface to this 50th anniversary edition, Bernard Bailyn isolates the Founders' profound concern with the uses and misuses of power.

This is 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, Bernard Bailyn explains the human reality against which the victors struggled.

This book provides insights into a past still important today. The authors cover the origins of Harvard and the foundations of its character, structure, and style of governance; the shifting relationships and power struggles among faculty, administration, and students over the years; and the growing diversity of the student body.

Finalist for the Pulitzer PrizeA 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.

Weaving elements of early modern European, African, and American history, Atlantic history embraces essentials of Western civilization, from the first contacts of Europe with the Western Hemisphere to independence movements and the industrial revolution. Bailyn explores the subject's origins, rapid development, and impact on historical study.