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.

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.

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.