Literature was Bailyn’s first love. Bernard Bailyn — Bud to his friends — was born on Sept. 10, 1922, in Hartford, Conn., to Charles and Esther (Schloss) Bailyn. When Professor Bailyn entered graduate school in 1946, the field of colonial history was viewed by many as a backwater. 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. Bernard Bailyn Funeral, Obituary, Service, Notices, Death: Bernard Bailyn Passed away on August 7, 2020, You can send your sympathy in the comment provided and share it with the family. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he was a self-described reading addict as a child who immersed himself in everyone from James Fenimore Cooper to Rudyard Kipling. 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. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal. For him, “a kind of literary imagination” was essential to the historian’s craft. NEW YORK — Bernard Bailyn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and educator of lasting influence whose “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” transformed how many thought about the country’s formation, has died … He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Almost from the beginning, he brought methodological rigor and startlingly fresh interpretive questions to that endeavor. Bernard Bailyn, an influential and significant historian of the American colonial period, passed away last week at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts. 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. After the war, he enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. The colonists had inherited this ideology from opposition politicians and writers in England, he argued. The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Lotte Bailyn, a professor of management emerita at the M.I.T. “I wanted to give the view of a major, literate opponent (of the revolution),” Bailyn told The Associated Press in 2003, saying he found poignancy in the story of a well-intentioned man on the wrong side of history. Some historians believed he idealized the founders and paid too little attention to the elite economic status of George Washington and others. Bailyn was best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” among the most influential historical works of the past few decades. NEW YORK -- Bernard Bailyn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and educator of lasting influence whose 'œThe Ideological Origins of the American Revolution' transformed how … Bernard Bailyn poses in his Harvard University office in Cambridge, Mass., on Feb. 26, 2003. 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. NEW YORK (AP) — Bernard Bailyn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and educator of lasting influence whose “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” transformed how many thought about the country’s formation, has died at 97. And his insights and interpretations, notably in his classic 1967 work, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” could be groundbreaking. He was 97. “Their world was very different from ours, but, more than any other country, we live with their world and with what they achieved.”. “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. Now, the giant is being valorized rather than derided, but the basic tactic is the same: to capitalize on the death of an intellectual celebrity to attack critical approaches in his field. Ross, Dr. Allen. 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. Professor Bailyn spoke at the Harvard convocation in 1986, before guests that included the Prince of Wales. He documented the effects of British and European culture on Americans, the role of pamphlets in revolutionary thinking and the rise of merchant and planter classes. The same pattern is now repeating itself following the death of the historian Bernard Bailyn on August 7, 2020 – this time as genuine farce. Growing up, he later recalled, he had not much been engaged by history. Bailyn was not universally praised. They were mostly ignored by the Supreme Court until the middle of the 20th century, when both liberal and conservative justices began citing them to back up opinions on everything from banking to alcohol. 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. Through a close reading of political pamphlets, Bailyn believed that the founders held sincere and reasoned ideas about democracy and profoundly objected to British claims of ultimate power to enact laws for the colonies. He was the father of Yale astrophysicist Charles Bailyn and Stony Brook linguist John Bailyn. Bernard Bailyn (September 9, 1922 – August 7, 2020) was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. 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?’”. 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. He was 97. “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 had an enduring and prolific career even though he was never as widely known as Gordon Wood and other historians of the early U.S. A longtime professor at Harvard who mentored numerous young historians, Bailyn probed everything from education to immigration in early American life and was widely credited with setting more rigorous standards of research. Bailyn was married to MIT Professor of Management Lotte (née Lazarsfeld). His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker. “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. Blogger buddy Gordon Sheaffer at Practically Historical wrote a brief but effective tribute to Bailyn earlier this week.. As Sheaffer wrote Monday: No other scholar impacted the study of the American Revolution more than Bailyn. Obituaries Bernard Bailyn, historian who reinterpreted the American Revolution, dies at 97 Bernard Bailyn in his Harvard University office in 2003. He had been in failing health, she said. Bernard Bailyn had an enduring and prolific career even though he was never as widely known as Gordon Wood and other historians of the early US A longtime professor at Harvard who mentored numerous young historians, Bailyn probed everything from education to immigration in early American life and was widely credited with setting more rigorous standards of research. 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. But it grew into a sweeping study that changed the course of debate about the nation’s founding. 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. 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. 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. He was among the first historians to mine statistics from historical records with a computer. He was 97. In 2010, Bailyn was awarded a National Humanities Medal “for illuminating the nation’s early history and pioneering the field of Atlantic history.” In his 90s, he completed a trilogy on the colonial population with “The Barbarous Years.”. By Renwick McLean and Jennifer Schuessler. Bernard Bailyn poses in his Harvard University office in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 26, 2003. His most prominent legacy was in forming a new narrative of the revolution itself. This “logic of rebellion” led the founders not only to defy their colonial rulers, but to envision “America’s destiny in the context of world history,” Bailyn wrote. “That is a remarkable achievement for a book published half a century ago.”. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World. Bernard Bailyn Obituary – Death | Dead – Passed Away Bernard Bailyn Death – Dead: A great loss was made known to InsideEko.As friends and families of the deceased are mourning the passing of their loved and cherished Bernard Bailyn. Professor Bernard Bailyn, Adams University Professor, Emeritus, and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, Emeritus, passed away on Friday, August 7, 2020.Professor Bailyn joined the faculty in 1954, served as Department chair 1970-72, became emeritus in 1993, and maintained a full research agenda thereafter, including organizing the Atlantic seminar 1995-2010. The impact of Professor Bailyn’s book reverberated far beyond colonial history. 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. 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