Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn (born September 10, 1922 in Hartford, Connecticut , † August 7, 2020 in Belmont , Massachusetts ) was an American historian who particularly emerged with works on the American colonial and revolutionary times.

He studied first at Williams College (AB 1945) and finally at Harvard University (AM 1947, Ph.D. 1953), where he also taught from 1949. His most important work is The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which resulted in a paradigm shift in the historiography of the American Revolution . Bailyn traced the formative influence of radical English Whigs of the 17th and early 18th centuries on the ideology of the American revolutionaries. He is also one of the founders of the so-called “ Atlantic history ”, a research approach that has been very fruitful since the 1980s, which seeks to overcome the often narrow perspective of national historiography and to grasp the relationships between Europe, Africa and America in a wider spatial framework .

Life

academic career

Bailyn grew up in Hartford, the town of his birth. After leaving school, he first studied at Williams College , where he mainly attended courses in literature and philosophy; towards the end of the Second World War, however, he was drafted into the army and served first in the Army Security Agency , then in the US Army Signal Corps . He did not return to Williams College, but received a bachelor's degree in absentia in 1945 . After the war he lived in Paris for a year. Upon his return to America, he began studying history at Harvard in September 1946 as a beneficiary of the GI Bill . Among other things, he dealt with Roman and Medieval history, but soon began to specialize in the economic and social history of the American colonial era. As formative mentors in his early years at Harvard, Bailyn names the medievalist Charles Taylor and the young Oscar Handlin , both advocates of a positivist approach to research into social and institutional history, as well as Samuel Eliot Morison , in whom he admired above all his narrative skills.

From 1949 he was on the history faculty of Harvard. In 1953 he became an assistant professor, 1953–63 he taught as an associate professor and finally until 1993 as a full professor in various endowed chairs (from 1966 as "Winthrop Professor", from 1983 as "Adams Professor"). Until his retirement he supervised more than 60 doctoral students, many of whom became luminaries in the field of American colonial history, in particular Gordon S. Wood , Michael Kammen , Stanley N. Katz , Jack N. Rakove , Fred Anderson and Peter C. Mancall .

In 1952 he married Lotte Lazarsfeld , the daughter of the Austrian sociologist Paul Felix Lazarsfeld , who emigrated in 1935 , who herself emerged as a social psychologist and taught at Harvard and later at MI T , where she has held a professorship in management since 1980. With her he wrote his second published monograph, Massachusetts Shipping, 1697-1714: A Statistical Study (1959).

In 1981 he was president of the American Historical Association .

Honors and prizes

Bailyn has twice received the Pulitzer Prize for History (1967 for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and 1987 for Voyagers to the West ). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution also won the Bancroft Prize in 1967 . For The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson , Bailyn received the National Book Award in 1975 .

In 1993 he received the Thomas Jefferson Medal , 1998, he was then the National Endowment for the Humanities as Jefferson Lecturer named, which is the highest honor that the American government has awarded for achievements in the humanities to. In 200 he gave the first Millennium Lecture in the White House .

The Society of American Historians honored him for his life's work in 2000 with the Bruce Catton Prize. A year later he received the Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and in 2004 the Kennedy Medal from the Massachusetts Historical Society .

Bailyn has received numerous honorary doctorates throughout his academic career:

• Lawrence University , LHD 1967
• Bard College , LHD 1968
• Williams College , Litt.D. 1969,
• Clark University , LHD 1975
• Yale University , LHD 1976
• Rutgers University , Litt. D. 1976
• Fordham University , Litt.D. 1976
• Grinnell College , LHD 1979
• Trinity College (Oxford University), LHD 1984
• Washington University in St. Louis , 1988
• Manhattanville College , LHD 1991
• Dartmouth College , LHD 1991
• University of Chicago , LHD 1991
• William and Mary College , LHD 1994.
• La Trobe University , LHD (1994?)
• Columbia University , Litt.D. 2010

He was also an honorary member of Christ's College at Cambridge University. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963), the American Philosophical Society (1971), the National Academy of Education , the Royal Irish Academy (2011), corresponding member of the British Academy , the Royal Historical Society , the Russian Academy of the Sciences , the Academia Europaea and the Academia Mexicana de la Historia .

Bailyn received a very special kind of honor as early as 1965, when the sociologist Robert K. Merton published his treatise On the Shoulders of Giants : It is consistently in the form of a letter to his friend Bailyn ("Dear Bud") .

plant

In his early work, Bailyn dealt extensively with the role of sea trade in the American colonial era, particularly in New England; it also became the subject of his dissertation. Bailyn's approach differed significantly from Perry Miller's , who had brought about a heyday of research in the field of colonial New England at Harvard since the 1930s. While Miller and his students examined above all the theological foundations of the social conception of the Puritan founding fathers of New England, Bailyn expressed an interest in the social history of the colonial era. His first article, an article on the merchant Robert Keayne , appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1950 ; here Bailyn traced how Keayne, often accused of greed, struggled to balance his business conduct between the demands of the market and burgeoning capitalism on the one hand and the ethical demands of the puritanical community on the other. This conflict of interest is also central to Bailyn's first book, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955). Bailyn showed here that the merchants of New England - unlike the dynasties of the Puritan clergy and magistrates - did not form a closed class, but that on the contrary, an extraordinarily high level of social mobility can be observed in their profession , which poses a serious threat to the strict hierarchical structure of the Puritan polities New England became, and they were steadily softened socially and politically. In his next book, Massachusetts Shipping, 1697–1714 , written together with his wife Lotte, he subjected the shipping register of the Massachusetts Colony to a statistical analysis. For this he also used a Hollerith punch card system , an unusual step in historical science, which was hardly empirically anchored at the time.

In the 1960s, Bailyn turned to the revolutionary era. For the John Harvard Library he took over the editing of a large-scale edition of pamphlets of the American Revolution, the first volume of which appeared in 1965. Bailyn's most important work, The Origins of the American Revolution , evolved from the preface to this anthology . In the hundreds of pamphlets that he viewed, he demonstrated the formative influence of an ideology that has so far been overlooked or underestimated even in works on the revolution that are oriented towards the history of ideas. As Bailyn showed, the American revolutionaries did not get their Enlightenment political ideas mainly from “great thinkers” such as Locke , Montesquieu or Rousseau , but from the populist writings of the “Country party” in England in the first half of the early 18th century Opposition to centralist and absolutist tendencies formed under the government of the Walpoles cabinet . In England itself this party remained a splinter group and was long forgotten by the time of the American Revolution, but it produced a wealth of literature which, strangely enough, if not in England, then in America fell on fertile soil, albeit a few decades late. Authors such as Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke , John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon aroused little more than antiquarian interest in England around 1765, while countless copies of their writings circulated in the American colonies and thus shaped the political ideas and vocabulary of the revolution . Bailyn showed that words like conspiracy or corruption , which historians had previously often ignored as mere interchangeable propaganda pods, had a special meaning in the discourse of country ideologues and later of revolutionaries.

Works

Monographs

• The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1955.
• (with Lotte Bailyn ): Massachusetts Shipping, 1697-1714: A Statistical Study . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1959.
• Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1960.
• The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1967. 2, expanded edition: ibid., 1992.
• The Origins of American Politics . Knopf, New York 1968.
• The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1974.
• The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction . Knopf, New York 1986.
• Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution . Knopf, New York 1986.
• Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence . Knopf, New York 1990.
• The Great Republic: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century America, 1820-1920 . DC Heath, Lexington, Mass. 1993.
• (Ed. By Edward Connery Lathem): On the Teaching and Writing of History: Responses to a Series of Questions . New England University Press, Hanover NH 1994.
• The Federalist Papers . Library of Congress, Washington DC 1998.
• To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders . Knopf, New York 2003.
• Atlantic History: Concept and Contours . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2005.

Articles (selection)

• The Apologia of Robert Keayne . In: The William and Mary Quarterly , Third Series, 7: 4, 1950. pp. 568-587.
• Politics and Social Structure in Virginia . In: James Morton Smith (Ed.): Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1959. pp. 90-115.
• Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America . In: The American Historical Review 67: 2, 1962. pp. 339-351.
• Religion and Revolution: Three Biographical Studies . In: Perspectives in American History 4, 1970. pp. 85-139.

Editing

• (with Jane N. Garrett): Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 . Volume 1. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1965.
• The Apologia of Robert Keayne: The Self-Portrait of a Puritan Merchant . Harper & Row, New York 1965.
• (with Donald Fleming): The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1969.
• (with Donald Fleming): Law in American History . Little, Brown, Boston 1972.
• (et al.): The Great Republic: A History of the American People . Heath, Boston and Toronto 1977. 4th, provisionally last edition 1992.
• (with John B. Hench): The Press and the American Revolution . American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 1980.
• (with Philip D. Morgan): Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1991.
• The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters during the Struggle over Ratification . 2 volumes. Library of America , New York 1993.

Secondary literature

• James A. Henretta, Stanley N. Katz, Michael Kammen (Eds.): The Transformation of Early American History: Society ,. Authority, and Ideology . Knopf, New York 1991. (Festschrift)
• Peter A. Coclanis: Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of ​​Atlantic History . In: Journal of World History 13: 1, 2002. pp. 169-182.
• Jack N. Rakove: Bernard Bailyn . In: Robert Allen Rutland (ed.): Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000 . University of Missouri Press, Columbia, MO 2000. pp. 5-22. ISBN 0-8262-1316-2

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Renwick McLean, Jennifer Schuessler. Bernard Bailyn, Eminent Historian of Early America, Dies at 97. In: The New York Times , August 7, 2020. Retrieved August 8, 2020.
2. ↑ Jack N. Rakove: Bernard Bailyn , 5.
3. ↑ Michael Kammen and Stanley M. Katz: Bernard Bailyn, Historian and Teacher . In: James A. Henretta, Stanley N. Katz, Michael Kammen (Eds.): The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology . Knopf, New York 1991. (Festschrift) p. 7.
4. ↑ A list of the dissertations supervised by Bailyn up to 1991 can be found in James A. Henretta, Stanley N. Katz, Michael Kammen (eds.): The Transformation of Early American History: Society. Authority, and Ideology . Pp. 262-266.
5. ^ Robert K. Merton: On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript . University of Chicago Press, 1965. Expanded 1993 edition with a foreword by Umberto Eco . Also the German translation on the shoulders of giants. A guide through the labyrinth of learning has been published several times, the last being a new edition in 2010 by Suhrkamp.