Volume 50, Number 2 · February 13, 2003
Creating the Revolution
By Gordon S. Wood
To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders
by Bernard Bailyn
Knopf, 185 pp., $26.00
OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW
Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunites for Study
by Bernard Bailyn
Norton, 147 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
by Bernard Bailyn
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 396 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
by Bernard Bailyn
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 423 pp., $20.95 (paper)
The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction
by Bernard Bailyn
Vintage, 177 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
by Bernard Bailyn, with Barbara DeWolfe
Knopf, 668 pp., $41.75
The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century
by Bernard Bailyn
Harvard University Press,245 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Pamphlets of the American Revolution
edited by Bernard Bailyn and Jane N. Garrett
Harvard University Press, 771 pp. (1965; out of print)
Bernard Bailyn is one of America's most distinguished historians and a new book by him is always welcome. This book is a collection of five lectures on the American Revolutionary generation that Bailyn presented at various conferences over the past decade or so. Despite their varied origin, however, the revised lectures, Bailyn says, have 'a unity of purpose and a consistency of theme.' All of the chapters attempt to probe the ways in which the peculiar circumstances of the Revolutionary leaders, in Bailyn's words, 'stimulated their imaginations, freed them from instinctive respect for traditional establishments, and encouraged them to create a new political world.' The results of their efforts, he believes, 'proved to be a turning point in the political history of Western civilization, radiating out through Europe and Latin America with effects that were as important as they are difficult to interpret.'
Review, 4832 words
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