Bernard Bailyn Quotes

Bernard Bailyn is an American historian, author, and academic 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 him for the Jefferson Lecture. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal. He is married to MIT Professor of Management Lotte Bailyn and is the father of Yale astrophysicist Charles Bailyn and Stony Brook Linguist John Bailyn.

He has specialized in American colonial and revolutionary-era history, looking at merchants, demographic trends, Loyalists, international links across the Atlantic, and especially the political ideas that motivated the Patriots. He is best known for studies of republicanism and Atlantic history that transformed the scholarship in those fields. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. September 1922

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Bernard Bailyn: 27   quotes 0   likes

Famous Bernard Bailyn Quotes

“Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.”

THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, Chapter VI, p. 305.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)

Bernard Bailyn Quotes

“The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.”

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter IV, THE LOGIC OF REBELLION, p. 138.

“What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.”

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter III, POWER AND LIBERTY A THEORY OF POLITICS, p. 57.

“The turning point was the Tea Act and the resulting Tea Party in Boston in December 1773.”

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter IV, THE LOGIC OF REBELLION, p. 118

“Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.”

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 203.

“At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.”

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 237.

“Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.”

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter I, THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION, p. 1.

“In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.”

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 302.

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