American historian (1922–2020)
Bernard Bailyn (September 9, 1922 – 7 August 2020), was an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard from 1953 and won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice, in 1968 and 1987.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Showing quotes in randomized order to avoid selection bias. Click Popular for most popular quotes.
PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that has long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.
In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution. No one, that is, deliberately worked for the destruction or even the substantial alteration of the order of society as it had been known. Yet it was transformed as a result of the Revolution...What did now affect the essentials of social organization— what in time would help permanently to transform them—were changes in the realm of belief and attitude. The views men held toward the relationships that bound them to each other—the discipline and pattern of society—moved in a new direction in the decade before Independence.
Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.
What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.