The Social Origins of Ideological Origins: Notes on the Historical Legacy of Bernard Bailyn

Abstract

B Bailyn, the influential and prolific historian of colonial and revolutionary America and the Atlantic world, died on August 7, 2020, at the age of ninety-seven. During his long teaching career at Harvard, he supervised more than seventy doctoral dissertations, my own among the last of them. In his retirement he served as mentor to hundreds more young scholars (366 to be precise), inviting them by the dozens to Cambridge each summer for the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, which he founded and ran from 1995 to 2010. Bailyn’s passing marks the end of a long scholarly era, associated with the enormous expansion of American higher education and the explosion of intellectual energy in the United States after the Second World War. Upon his death, obituaries and editorials repeated a “just-so” story about Bailyn’s career and his influence on early American history. This story originated, I suspect, in graduate historiography seminars following the 1967 publication of Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and has been reified across subsequent decades in review essays, doctoral dissertations, and the introductions to monographs.1 The