![]() ![]() How far, I asked with youthful bluster, were minutemen really inspired by the cautionary tale of seventeenth-century Denmark? And yet, like the profession itself, I have found it hard to shake Bailyn’s shadow. As an undergraduate, I too railed against the book. ![]() Often, simply mentioning Bailyn’s name can be a pejorative shorthand-an outmoded view of the past that celebrates elites at the expense of the darker underbelly of the Revolution. Yet it is hard to say that the book is beloved. ![]() Fifty years after its publication, Bailyn’s seminal work still features prominently on graduate and undergraduate reading lists. I don’t think this is an uncommon experience for an early Americanist. It took me a long time to warm to The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Today, we continue “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution at 50,” our joint roundtable with the S-USIH blog with a post by Kenneth Owen, an Assistant Professor of Early American History at the University of Illinois Springfield, whose research interests focus on political mobilization and organization in the revolutionary and early national eras. ![]()
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