26 Facts About Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in US Colonial and Revolutionary-era History.

Bernard Bailyn was a professor at Harvard University from 1953.

Bernard Bailyn was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal.

Bernard Bailyn specialized in American colonial and revolutionary-era history, looking at merchants, demographic trends, Loyalists, international links across the Atlantic, and especially the political ideas that motivated the Patriots.

Bernard Bailyn was best known for studies of republicanism and Atlantic history that transformed the scholarship in those fields.

Bernard Bailyn was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1971.

Bernard Bailyn was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1922, the son of Esther and Charles Manuel Bernard Bailyn.

Bernard Bailyn earned his bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1945 and in 1953 earned his Ph.

Bernard Bailyn was associated with Harvard for the rest of his life.

Bernard Bailyn was made a full professor in 1961, and professor emeritus in 1993.

Bernard Bailyn was the author of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1968.

Bernard Bailyn was the editor of The Apologia of Robert Keayne and of the two-volume Debate on the Constitution.

Bernard Bailyn argued that international commerce was an uncertain business, given the high risk of losses at sea in the very long turnaround times meant that information was often too old to be useful.

Bernard Bailyn pointed the younger generation of historians away from Puritan theology and toward broader social and economic forces.

Bernard Bailyn expanded his research to the social structure of Virginia, showing how its leadership class was transformed in the 1660s.

Bernard Bailyn is known for meticulous research and for interpretations that sometimes challenge the conventional wisdom, especially those dealing with the causes and effects of the American Revolution.

Bernard Bailyn thus argued that the Revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and freedom was not simply propagandistic but rather central to their understanding of the situation.

Bernard Bailyn argued that republicanism was at the core of the values French radical thinkers had striven to affirm.

Bernard Bailyn located the intellectual sources of the American Revolution within a broader British political framework, explaining how English country Whig ideas about civic virtue, corruption, ancient rights, and fear of autocracy were, in the colonies, transformed into the ideology of republicanism.

In Bernard Bailyn's assessment, contested libertarian meanings change through time as "the colonists" struggled to define, and to pursue, the property of independence.

Bernard Bailyn was a major innovator in new research techniques, such as quantification, collective biography, and kinship analysis.

Bernard Bailyn is representative of those scholars who believe in the concept of American exceptionalism but avoid the terminology, and thereby avoid getting entangled in rhetorical debates.

Bernard Bailyn was married to MIT Professor of Management Lotte Bernard Bailyn.

Bernard Bailyn's two sons are Charles Bailyn, who is an astrophysicist at Yale University, and John Bailyn, a linguist at Stony Brook University.

Bernard Bailyn died on August 7,2020, at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Former students of Bailyn include Pulitzer Prize winners Michael Kammen, Jack N Rakove, and Gordon S Wood, as well as Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Beth Norton.