Annotated by the author on back flyleaf and pastedown including additional detached notes; also includes annotated detached copy of correspondence to Mynheer van Teigham from [H. Laurens].,AOW

Enlarged version of the General introduction in the author's Pamphlets of the American Revolution, v. 1, published in 1965.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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. 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. In the end I concluded that no fewer than seventy-two of them ought to be re-published. But sheer numbers were not the most important measure of the magnitude of the project. 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 for all their variety they have in common one distinctive characteristic: they are, to an unusual degree, explanatory. 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. 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. - Foreword.

From the Bernard Bailyn Library and received as a gift from Lotte Bailyn,,September 2021.,AOW

Pulitzer Prize, History, 1968.

Bancroft Prize, 1968.

SACFinal081324