Bailyn, Bernard

Bailyn, Bernard bāˈlĭn [key], 1922–2020, U.S. historian, b. Hartford, Conn. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard (1953), he taught U.S. colonial history there, becoming a full professor in 1961 (emeritus from 1993). He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which challenged long-standing interpretations of the causes of the American Revolution, and Voyagers to the West (1986). His other books include The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955), Massachusetts Shipping, 1697–1714 (1959; one of the first historical works to use a computer to analyze data), Education in the Forming of American Society (1960), The Origins of American Politics (1968), The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974), The Peopling of British North America (1986), On the Teaching and Writing of History (1994), To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (2003), and The Barbarous Years (2012). Illuminating History (2020) is an intellectual memoir focused by documents and persons that interested him over his seven decades as a historian.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Historians, U.S.: Biographies