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“... It is no new thing for British historians to write knowledgeably about American history. They were at work by the early 18th century, wrote significant histories (mainly Tory) of the American Revolution soon after the event had concluded, and in the 19th century produced, in G.O. Trevelyan’s six volumes on the Revolution, one of the magisterial works of Whig historiography, and in the two American volumes of Lecky’s History of England in the 18th Century a masterpiece of balanced judgment, character analysis and comprehension of complex issues ...”

“... hundreds of pamphlets on the Anglo-American conflict published in the colonies before 1776, Bernard Bailyn was struck by the excitement with which their authors spoke about what were for him ‘the common-places of liberal thought of their time’. How to explain their apparently inexhaustible appetite for the ideas and rhetoric of late 17th and ...”

“... But is the move across the Atlantic merely an enlarged form of this pattern? Is Professor Bailyn right when he speaks of the Atlantic crossing as having drawn ‘thousands of ordinary Britons’ year after year? Or is the migrant a particular type of person, propelled by ambition or failure, discontent or aspiration? Can we speak of ‘the ...”

“... independence wasn’t predictable or straightforward. The most persuasive explanation, advanced by Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), is that the reading habits of the 18th-century colonists tilted heavily towards the fretful opposition Whiggery of the mother country. By contrast with mainstream Whiggish ...”

“... of republicanism excavated by a distinguished group of historians, including Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock, offered a compelling account of the reasons British Americans broke with monarchy and then embarked on such a distinctive constitutional experiment, hedged with an idiosyncratic Bill of Rights. For example, the ...”

“... history, including the provincial decades that Butler surveys and the Revolutionary years proper. Bernard Bailyn was making much the same argument about colonial society back in the 1950s and 1960s: in the powerful concluding pages of his landmark study of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution he evoked the image of ‘a society where ...”

“... more self-government. The most recent generation of scholars, inspired above all by the work of Bernard Bailyn, has moved the ideas of the revolutionaries to centre stage. One can only explain the feverish American resistance to mild British measures like the Sugar and Stamp Acts, they insist, by understanding that they were refracted through an ...”

“... from the top down. A ‘tiny élite’ created the nation, and Johnson offers no sense of what Bernard Bailyn calls the ‘contagion of liberty’ – the way small farmers, urban labourers and even slaves seized on the patriotic ideology to advance their own claims. Johnson’s account of the late 19th century offers an excellent description of ...”

“... and separation pulled most insistently across the Atlantic – ‘a world in motion’, as Bernard Bailyn put it, defined by migration and circulation. Sarah Pearsall’s Atlantic Families investigates what she describes as the ‘Shiva-like quality of the Atlantic world, its ability to destroy as well as to build’ human relationships across ...”

“... interim the historical foundations of the Hartz thesis crumbled. From the mid-1960s the works of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock demonstrated that the revolution and constitution owed more to a participatory language of virtue, duty and civic activism derived from the Ancients via Machiavelli and late 17th-century English Commonwealthmen ...”

“... lower class of these people’ which even affected their officers. Since the pioneering work of Bernard Bailyn in the 1960s, American historians have been aware that the dominant political language of Revolutionary America was a strain of classical republicanism which stressed that a population’s enjoyment of liberty depended on its public ...”

“... equal opportunity for liberty and happiness of the subject’. The arguments collected in Bernard Bailyn’s handsomely edited and enlightening two-volume selection from The Debate on the Constitution in 1787-8 should challenge such complacency. The American Revolution was not the first revolt of colonial nationalism, and the Constitution ...”