[NYT] Bernard Bailyn, Eminent Historian of Early America, Dies at 97

I know people ordinarily post obits in the Hangout, but given the debates here about politics, ideology, political theory, and American origins, it seems appropriate to put this here. Bailyn was an absolute giant as a historian.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/books/bernard-bailyn-dead.html?smid=tw-share

Bernard Bailyn, Eminent Historian of Early America, Dies at 97
On topic after topic he shifted the direction of scholarly inquiry, winning two Pulitzers and a Bancroft Prize for his innovative research and groundbreaking works.

By Renwick McLean and Jennifer Schuessler
Published Aug. 7, 2020 Updated Aug. 8, 202

Bernard Bailyn, a Harvard scholar whose award-winning books on early American history reshaped the study of the origins of the American Revolution, died on Friday at his home in Belmont, Mass., a suburb of Boston. He was 97.

The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Lotte Bailyn, a professor of management emerita at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.

Though his name may not ring a bell with the legions of readers who devour best-selling books on the founding of America, few historians since World War II have left an imprint on that field of study that rivals Professor Bailyn’s. From the beginning, his work was innovative. He was among the first historians to mine statistics from historical records with a computer. And his insights and interpretations, notably in his classic 1967 work, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” could be groundbreaking.

On topic after topic, in more than 20 books that he wrote or edited, he shifted the direction of scholarly inquiry, in the process winning two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, a Bancroft Prize (the most prestigious award given to scholars of American history) and, in 2011, the National Humanities Medal, presented in a White House ceremony by President Barack Obama. And as a professor at Harvard for more than a half-century, he seeded many of the nation’s top university history departments with his acolytes.

“He has transformed the field of early American history as much as any single person could,” Gordon S. Wood, a historian at Brown University and a former student of Professor Bailyn’s, said in an interview for this obituary in 2008. “He transformed the history of education. He turned over our entire interpretation of the Revolution. He changed the way we think about immigration. Almost every single thing he did had a profound impact on the field.”

When Professor Bailyn entered graduate school in 1946, the field of colonial history was viewed by many as a backwater. Almost from the beginning, he brought methodological rigor and startlingly fresh interpretive questions to that endeavor.

Early in his career, he and his wife, while studying colonial-era shipping, entered statistics from Massachusetts shipping records into a primitive computer and found that Boston had one of the largest merchant fleets in the British Empire in the early 1700s, indicating a surprisingly vibrant and self-reliant economy. The resulting work, “Massachusetts Shipping, 1697-1714: A Statistical Study” (1959), was one of the first historical works to include data analyzed by a computer.

In other studies, Professor Bailyn examined specific social groups, like New England merchants — whose moneymaking, he argued, was as important to understanding the country’s origins as their Puritan religion — and the Virginia gentry.

He remains best known for “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” published in 1967. It began as a bibliographical essay on hundreds of colonial pamphlets published between 1750 and 1776, which he had been charged with preparing for publication. But it grew into a sweeping study that changed the course of debate about the nation’s founding.

The book, which won both a Pulitzer and the Bancroft Prize, challenged the then-dominant view of Progressive Era historians like Charles Beard, who saw the founders’ revolutionary rhetoric as a mask for economic interests.

For Professor Bailyn, the pamphlets revealed a striking pattern. In his view, though the colonists opposed taxes, restrictions on trade and other economic measures, and were frustrated with their subordinate status in British society, it was a fundamental distrust of government power that led them to throw off the colonial yoke.

The colonists had inherited this ideology from opposition politicians and writers in England, he argued. But it became particularly potent in the relative isolation of the American colonies, where unpopular policies enacted an ocean away were interpreted as signs of a corrupt conspiracy to deny colonists their freedom.

The impact of Professor Bailyn’s book reverberated far beyond colonial history. The historian Forrest McDonald wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1990 that in the two decades after “Ideological Origins” was published, “ideological interpretation of the whole sweep of American history from the 1760s to the 1840s expanded into a veritable cottage industry.”

The book drew readers from beyond the scholarly world. A 1971 article in the The Times about Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, described him pulling a copy of “Ideological Origins” the Bailyn book out of his briefcase and being moved almost to tears as he read from it.

Today, as debate over the origins and meaning of the American Revolution remains contentious, the book remains on syllabuses, drawing engagement even from younger scholars who might otherwise dismiss decades-old historical works as outmoded.

“Most of the books published in the decades after ‘Ideological Origins’ responded to it in some way — often by challenging its arguments,” the historian Mary Beth Norton, a former Bailyn student,, wrote in 2017 in one of a number of round tables marking the book’s 50th anniversary. “That is a remarkable achievement for a book published half a century ago.”

Professor Bailyn was known not just for rigorous scholarship but also for his elegant prose. For him, “a kind of literary imagination” was essential to the historian’s craft.

“Like a novelist,” he wrote, the historian must conjure “a nonexistent, an impalpable world in all its living comprehension, and yet do this within the constraints of verifiable facts.”

Though he stressed the importance of narrative, he did not write to popularize history, and rarely gave interviews. But he wrote not just for scholars but also for his “better students” —non-scholars, as he put it in one of those rare interviews, in 1994, with “an active interest in history who would be sufficiently interested to read some detailed material.”

Within the profession, Professor Bailyn was a frequent critic of overspecialization, abstraction and politicized “presentism” — that is, interpreting past events in terms of modern thinking and values. For him, it was essential to respect the strangeness and pastness of the past, and to see it, as much as possible, on its own terms.

“The establishment, in some significant degree, of a realistic understanding of the past, free of myths, wish fulfillments and partisan delusions, is essential for social sanity,” he said in a 1995 lecture.

Bernard Bailyn — Bud to his friends — was born on Sept. 10, 1922, in Hartford, Conn., to Charles and Esther (Schloss) Bailyn. His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker.

In 1940, he entered Williams College in Massachusetts, where he majored in English and dabbled in philosophy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1945, after he had been drafted into the Army.

Growing up, he later recalled, he had not much been engaged by history. But while serving in the Signal Corps, he studied the German language and social geography. After the war, he enrolled in graduate school at Harvard.

At the time, Harvard was still a redoubt of the old WASP establishment. Professor Bailyn, who was Jewish, later recalled how one of his professors, the eminent scholar Samuel Eliot Morison, had taken little interest in him, and repeatedly confused him with a member of the Harvard Yacht Club.

By Professor Bailyn’s account, he fell into colonial history almost accidentally, driven mainly by a desire to examine, as he put it, “the connections between a distant past and an emerging modernity.”

He earned his Ph.D. in 1953 and joined the Harvard faculty. He was famous for his vivid lectures and heady if not intimidating graduate seminar, where he would punctuate wayward discussion with what the historian Jack N. Rakove recalled as “the most famous of his questions, ‘So what?’”

The book on the Revolution cemented his reputation, but Professor Bailyn continued to explore new territory and new genres. In 1975, he published “The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson,” a biography of the last colonial governor of Massachusetts.

The book, which won the National Book Award, was an attempt to explore, as he said, “the origins of the Revolution as experienced by the losers.” But it was read by some as a defense of the establishment — or even, some suggested, of Richard M. Nixon, who had resigned the presidency the year before the book was published — at a time of political upheaval at Harvard and across the country.
​

more

 

conclusion

Professor Bailyn, who once described himself as “not very political,” cheerfully scoffed at the idea that he would be using Hutchinson to make a modern-day point. But he did allow that he had come to feel sympathy for Hutchinson, whom he described as “that rather stiff, intelligent, highly literate, uncorrupted, honest, upright provincial merchant-turned-judge and politician.”

In more recent decades, as interest in the experiences of women, African-Americans and other marginalized groups exploded among historians, Professor Bailyn’s name was sometimes invoked as “pejorative shorthand for an outmoded view of the past that celebrates elites,” as the historian Kenneth Owen put it in 2017.

For his part, Professor Bailyn often spoke against what he called the “fashionable” tendency to excoriate the American founders, whom he called, for all their faults, “one of the most creative groups in history.”

“They gave us the foundations of our public life,” he told an interviewer in 2010. “Their world was very different from ours, but, more than any other country, we live with their world and with what they achieved.”

Professor Bailyn won a second Pulitzer in 1987, for “Voyagers to the West,” the first volume of a series called “The Peopling of British North America,” which traces the journeys of the nearly 10,000 Britons who were known to have emigrated to America from 1773 to 1776 and explores the processes by which the colonies became a distinctly American society.

A second volume, “The Barbarous Years,” published in 2013, chronicles the chaotic, violent decades between the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and the 1675 conflict known as King Philip’s War, which effectively pushed Native Americans out of New England.

“The Barbarous Years” was a finalist for the Pulitzer, but, like “Voyagers,” it drew strong criticism from fellow historians for what they saw as inadequate or dismissive treatment of nonwhite people.

Professor Bailyn pressed on. In 1995, four years after officially retiring, he established the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, an annual Harvard gathering of young scholars from around the world that is credited with helping to pioneer the now-vast field of Atlantic history.

In addition to his wife, Professor Bailyn is survived by two sons, Charles, an astronomy professor at Yale, and John, a linguistics professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island; and two granddaughters.

For all the grand sweep of his interpretations, Professor Bailyn could seem at his most exuberant when digging into the fine-grained particularities of sources, puzzling over the historical “anomalies” — a favorite Bailyn word — that they reveal.

In 2020, he published “Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades,” an intellectual self-portrait that eschews conventional memoir in favor of a series of essays exploring some “small, strange, obscure documents and individuals” that had captured his imagination.

In an epilogue, he cautioned, as he often did, against imposing our own sense of certainty on the confusion of the past as it was actually experienced by those who lived it.

“The fact — the inescapable fact — is that we know how it all came out,” he wrote, “and they did not.”

@jennyschuessler

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 8, 2020, Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Bernard Bailyn, 97, Who Transformed the Field of American History, Is Dead.​

 

https://thebulwark.com/the-revolution-of-bernard-bailyn/

The Revolution of Bernard Bailyn
by Daniel N. Gullotta

Bernard Bailyn, a historian celebrated both for his work on early America and for mentoring a generation of scholars who would go on to make their own major contributions to the field, died last week. In a long career—he finished his dissertation in 1953 and his most recent book was published just four months before his death at age 97—Bailyn helped to revitalize the study of the colonial era and the Founding, bringing both lay readers and his fellow historians toward a richer understanding of the role of ideas and ideology in early American politics.

Early in Bailyn’s career, the reigning academic orthodoxy—inspired by Progressive Era historians like Charles Beard—held that the American Revolution was hardly revolutionary and that the complaints of tyranny coming from the patriots were really propaganda to disguise and defend their economic self-interest. Bailyn disagreed: He had spent years studying the pamphlet literature produced by the colonists, and saw in their writings genuine conviction.

Bailyn noticed in these texts deep discourses on the nature of power, fear or even paranoia about liberty and tyranny, and any number of conspiracy theories. He traced the pedigree of these modes of writing and thinking back nearly a century. The Whig radicals and the “country” opposition literature that could be found in English pamphlets during the days of the Glorious Revolution created the ideological and rhetorical lenses through which the American colonists would interpret the crises with Britain in the 1760s, like the clash over the Stamp Act and the stationing of British troops in Boston.

As Bailyn put it in the foreword to his most acclaimed work, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), “Study of the pamphlets confirmed my rather old-fashioned view that the American Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle.” At its core, the American Revolution was formed, fueled, and fought with ideas; ideas that would have implications for and effects on the American people and the republic they would establish. Through what Bailyn imaginatively called the “contagion of liberty,” these ideas would spread and allow other ideas concerning the abolition of slavery, the disestablishment of religion, and the expansion of democratic rights, to take root and grow.

Bailyn was awarded both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes for Ideological Origins in 1968—and that year he came out with The Origins of American Politics, a collection of three lectures, derived from a previous project on colonial politics, exploring just why in the first place colonial society had been so susceptible to ideological politics. Then, turning from the patriots to the loyalists, Bailyn produced The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974), a sympathetic portrait of the last royal governor of Massachusetts Bay, for which he was awarded the National Book Prize.

Fascinated by the connections and networks people made with one another through print and material culture, as well as the byways and movements of peoples across land and sea, Bailyn championed the field of “Atlantic history.” He would win a second Pulitzer for Voyagers to the West (1986), a demographic study and social history of British immigration to the colonies on the eve of the Revolution. In its spiritual prequel, The Barbarous Years (2012), Bailyn would focus on “the peopling of British North America” in the 17th century, highlighting the internal and external conflict among the British, Dutch, Swedish, Africans, and Native Americans. Bailyn’s final book, published this past April, Illuminating History, offers reflections on his life as a historian, the art of history writing, and his final contributions to the study of colonial America.

Robert C. Maynard, the journalist and longtime editor of the Oakland Tribune, wrote in a 1990 column, “One of the great regrets of my life, and it might have changed the course of my life, concerns Professor Bernard Bailyn. I had the opportunity to study with him at Harvard [in the 1960s], and I passed it up to concentrate on the ‘dismal science’ of economics. I have often regretted that decision.”

Studying with Bailyn certainly changed the course of many of his students’ lives. He trained a host of influential and award-winning historians of early America, such as Gordon Wood, Mary Beth Norton, Jack Rakove, and the late Pauline Maier. Bailyn’s mentorship is celebrated for producing one of the greatest cohorts of up-and-coming historians the field has ever seen. But his tutelage extended well beyond his graduate students; he also helped develop the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, which sought to train younger scholars interested in Atlantic History.

For such an influential figure, it is striking that Bailyn rarely waded into the waters of present-day controversy. Unlike many other historians who write regularly on contemporary affairs, you would be hard pressed to find opinion columns he wrote across the decades. That said, he was widely quoted by journalists and judges—including Supreme Court justices in their legal opinions. And he did feel compelled to give voice to some of his concerns about the historical profession, including not just the academy’s trend towards hyper-specialization but also the sin of “presentism”—that is, interpreting the past in contemporary terms and with modern expectations.

In 1975, at the International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Bailyn famously clashed with Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and others who sought to link the American Revolution with modern Communist revolutions. “There is always a need to extract from the past some kind of bearing on contemporary problems, some message, commentary, or instruction to the writer’s age, and to see reflected in the past familiar aspects of the present,” Bailyn warned. “In the absence of critical control, this generates an obvious kind of presentism, which at worst becomes indoctrination by historical example.” Rather than disparaging the American royalists as mere reactionaries or as detached conservatives, Bailyn sought to tell the story from their perspective in his book on Thomas Hutchinson and encouraged historians to do the same when writing about the Russians who had stayed loyal to the tsar—encouraging compassion for the ‘losers of history.’

The balancing of historical sensibility, sympathy, and scrutiny was a recurring theme in Bailyn’s career. And while he did not remark on current affairs with the frequency of some other historians, the occasions when he did are instructive. In 1977, when disputes arose about the historical accuracy of Alex Haley’s book Roots and its hugely popular TV adaptation, Bailyn commented, “It’s a work of fiction . . . and its importance is as a work of fiction and a very powerful one. I don’t think its importance rests on whether or not such-and-such a ship was in such-and-such a place. I don’t give a damn if they don’t find the ship he names. It is a powerful book for other reasons altogether.”

In 1982, when some pundits were bemoaning the supposed end of the American Dream, a reporter asked Bailyn about the cultural changes the country was witnessing. No doubt drawing on his experience studying the paranoia of the American revolutionaries, Bailyn responded: “That’s ridiculous. . . . There’s never been a time when people didn’t think the country was falling apart.”

In the early 1990s, Bailyn and his Harvard colleague Stephan Thernstorm were jointly teaching a course for which they used a diary belonging to a Southern slaveholder. The students accused Bailyn of not giving equal time to the writing of slaves, to which Bailyn—at least according to an account of this incident reported in Playboy magazine—said no texts by slaves of the era existed. Bailyn and Thernstorm reportedly dropped the class from their teaching assignments.

Over the years, Bailyn was accused in various reassessments of his work of not appreciating enough the role of women in the Revolution, as well as understating the darker elements of the Founding era, such as slavery and the clashes with Native Americans. He was sanguine about such criticism, however, writing: “Succeeding generations will write different kinds of histories—and should.”
​

more at the link