The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Encyclopedia
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is a Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize for History
The Pulitzer Prize for History has been awarded since 1917 for a distinguished book upon the history of the United States. Many history books have also been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography...

-winning book of history by Bernard Bailyn
Bernard Bailyn
Bernard Bailyn is an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He has been a professor at Harvard University since 1953. Bailyn has won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice . In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected...

. It is considered one of the most influential studies of the American Revolution
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...

 published during the 20th century.

The book grew out of Bailyn's introduction to the first volume of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, a series of documents of the Revolutionary era which he edited for the John Harvard Library
John Harvard Library (series)
The John Harvard Library is a series of books published since 1959 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The series consists of reprints of historically significant American writings, including historic documents, fiction, poetry, memoirs, and criticism.-History:Founded in 1959, the...

. In the process of reading hundreds of pamphlets published between 1750 and 1776, Bailyn detected a pattern of similarities in argument, language, and invocation of certain figures including Cato the Younger
Cato the Younger
Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis , commonly known as Cato the Younger to distinguish him from his great-grandfather , was a politician and statesman in the late Roman Republic, and a follower of the Stoic philosophy...

 and radical Whig
British Whig Party
The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...

 heroes Algernon Sidney and John Wilkes
John Wilkes
John Wilkes was an English radical, journalist and politician.He was first elected Member of Parliament in 1757. In the Middlesex election dispute, he fought for the right of voters—rather than the House of Commons—to determine their representatives...

. Bailyn analyzes the content of these popular pamphlets as clues to "the 'great hinterland' of belief" in the English North American colonies, "notions which men often saw little need to explain because they were so obvious." In lyrical prose that channels the radical Whig impulse, Bailyn explains the great hinterland of libertarianism for them.

The book argued against the interpretation, identified with historian Charles A. Beard
Charles A. Beard
Charles Austin Beard was, with Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century. He published hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science...

, that the Revolution had been primarily class warfare between competing social classes. Bailyn found that pamphlet writers sounded the same themes in their private writing as in public, and that their expressed fears of "slavery," "corruption," and a "conspiracy" against radical libertarianism were genuine.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK