Bernard Bailyn

Over a career that spanned more than seven decades, historian Bernard Bailyn wrote and edited more than 20 books on early American and Atlantic history. Bailyn joined the Harvard faculty in 1953 and became a full professor in 1961 and was director of the Charles Warren Center for American History from 1983‒1994. He was also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows for almost 25 years.

His career – as a writer and professor – was characterized by his willingness to reexamine commonly accepted views and his interest in delving into and valuing primary source material. 

His breakthrough book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution was published in 1967 and won the Pulitzer Price for history and the Bancroft Prize for American history writing. The book departed from the dominant view that colonists were motivated primarily by economic interests, but Bailyn argued that the opposition to the British government was rooted in an affirmative desire for freedom.

Bailyn won a National Book Award in 1975 for The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, a biography of the last colonial governor of Massachusetts. He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for Voyagers to the West, published in 1987, which shed new light on the emigration of Britons to the colonies in the mid-1770s.

Bailyn received the 2010 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama “for illuminating our nation’s early history and pioneering the field of Atlantic history.”