American Antiquarian Society
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United States
When Bernard Bailyn's book The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson was published in 1974, the Times Literary Supplement called it "a biography that is a work of art: exquisitely written, delicate in insight, and imbued with a wisdom about men and affairs that is the true hallmark of a great historian." The book subsequently won the National Book Award for History in 1975. Now, inaugurating the first annual Robert C. Baron Lecture, Bailyn will return to AAS to discuss his reasons for writing The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, how he interpreted Hutchinson's career as the despised anti-hero of the American Revolution, the book's original reception, and his own assessment of his work, thirty years after its publication.
Bernard Bailyn is the Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of seventeen books and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and Voyagers to the West (1986).