The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

The first ‘histories’ of the American Revolution took the form of biographies of notable revolutionary leaders. The following links contain brief summaries of its main historical movements: The biographers Parson Weems It i4nvolves thousands of different historians and contains many different conclusions and perspectives. The historiography of the American Revolution spans more than two centuries. Historical understanding and viewpoints can also change over time, as new evidence is uncovered and new perspectives are identified and explored. This is particularly true for major events like wars and revolutions, which are by their nature politically tumultuous and divisive.

Historians study the same periods, people and events – but they approach these topics with different views, assumptions, priorities and methods.Īs a consequence, historians often reach different conclusions and form different interpretations and arguments. Instead, history is an ongoing discussion and debate about the past. Foreword.10 The radical Left (late 1900s) Ongoing debateĬontrary to what some may believe, history is not a concrete narrative or set of facts. 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. 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. But for all their variety they have in common one distinctive characteristic: they are, to an unusual degree, explanatory. 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 sheer numbers were not the most important measure of the magnitude of the project. In the end I concluded that no fewer than seventy-two of them ought to be re-published. 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. 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 Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn