The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

What the revolutionaries were actually reading and arguing about, reconstructed from the pamphlets they wrote to one another. Bailyn found a generation steeped in classical history and gripped by the fear of a conspiracy against liberty, and showed that ideas, not only taxes and interests, drove them to break with Britain. The book changed how the founding is understood by taking the founders' own words seriously as causes, not decoration.

The historian who reconstructed what the American revolutionaries were actually reading and arguing about, rather than what later generations assumed. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution traced the pamphlets, the classical references, and the fear of conspiracy against liberty that drove the colonists to break with Britain. He showed that ideas, not only interests, made the Revolution.