Bernard Bailyn

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is a classic of American historical literature--required reading for understanding the Founders' ideas and their struggles to implement them. In the preface to this 50th anniversary edition, Bernard Bailyn isolates the Founders' profound concern with the uses and misuses of power.--

"A series of brilliant historical portraits combine to create a self-portrait of one of our greatest historians. With characteristic vitality and brilliance, Bernard Bailyn revisits the major phases of his long, pathbreaking career and offers readers new insights into history and his distinctive approach to understanding it. From his early work on the New England merchants through his groundbreaking study of the American Revolution and on into his...

A portrait of the background, origins, character, and legacy of the American Revolution.

"The past has always been elusive: how can we understand people whose worlds were utterly different from our own without imposing our own standards and hindsight? What did things feel like in the moment when outcomes were uncertain? How can we recover the uncertainties of the past, before the outcomes were known? What kind of imagination goes into the writing of transformative history? Are there latent trends that distinguish the kinds of history...

Shedding new light on British expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this collection of essays examines how the first British Empire was received and shaped by its subject peoples in Scotland, Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean.An introduction surveys British imperial historiography and provides a context for the volume as a whole. The essays focus on specific ethnic groups -- Native Americans, African-Americans, Scotch-Irish,...

From an acclaimed historian of early America, a compelling account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to the British colonies of North America and their involvements with each other and the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard.