As a result I found myself, as I read through these many documents, studying not simply a particular medium of publication but, through these documents, nothing less than the ideological origins of the American Revolution. They reveal not merely positions taken but the reasons why positions were taken they review motive and understanding: the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas - the articulated worldview - that lay behind the manifest events of the time. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Fiftieth Anniversary Edition Bernard Bailyn Product Details PAPERBACK 26.00 £22.95 23. But for all their variety they have in common one distinctive characteristic: they are, to an unusual degree, explanatory. The pamphlets include all sorts of writings - treatises on political theory, essays on history, political arguments, sermons, correspondence, poems - and they display all sorts of literary devices.
But sheer numbers were not the most important measure of the magnitude of the project. In the preface to this 50th anniversary edition, Bernard Bailyn isolates the Founders' profound concern with the uses and misuses of power. In the end I concluded that no fewer than seventy-two of them ought to be re-published. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is a classic of American historical literature - required reading for understanding the Founders' ideas and their struggles to implement them.
The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred.
This book has developed from a study that was first undertaken a number of years ago, when Howard Mumford Jones, then editor-in-chief of the John Harvard Library, invited me to prepare a collection of pamphlets of the American Revolution for publication in that series.
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