"I do not believe that ideas move history; people do, and people are products of their time and place."
So says Bernard Bailyn, one of the most eminent American historians of the last half of the 20th century, who recently delivered the prestigious annual O. Meredith Wilson Lecture in History at the University of Utah. His subject was "Politics and the Creative Imagination: The Founding Generation."Bailyn, a professor emeritus of history at Harvard University, is a prolific historian, having written numerous books, including two Pulitzer Prize winners -- "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" (1967) and "Voyagers to the West" (1986), as well as the winner of the National Book Award, "The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson" (1975).
"I've always had a great interest in teaching," Bailyn said during a pre-lecture telephone interview with the Deseret News from his home in Boston. "You can't separate teaching and research. Teaching is the best way in the world to work your ideas out and get feedback from critically minded students.
"In teaching undergraduates, the challenge is to open a field to those who know nothing about it, to present the whole in a comprehensible way. In teaching graduate students, you're sharing your viewpoint with younger colleagues. Feedback from students is critical. You know perfectly well if it's getting across. "
Even so, Bailyn believes that every teacher uses different techniques "because it is an expression of yourself. You have to develop your own manner in conveying your interest in the subject."
Eric Hinderaker, a member of the U.'s history faculty, was a doctoral student at Harvard in the 1980s. He remembers Bailyn as "a tremendously magnetic, engaging lecturer who wanted to stimulate our imaginations and get us to think what it would be like to write history. He is articulate and versatile. He would tell us to watch TV's 'Hill Street Blues,' because he thought the narrative structure of that show was interesting. He wanted to engage students on a conceptual, imaginative basis. He's also a wonderful writer."
One of the personalities Bailyn has elucidated with great success is that of Thomas Hutchinson, a Boston-born loyalist to the crown who served in Massachusetts as secretary of state, lieutenant governor and governor. Hutchison was also an intellectual who collected an archive so he could write a multivolume history of Massachusetts. During the pre-Revolutionary years, he was singled out as an object of hate even more than King George III. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and other Revolutionary figures thought him a dangerous man. In fact, they suspected him of indiscretions and conspiracies of which he was innocent.
Hutchinson, says Bailyn, "was the most vilified and hated man by the revolutionary generation, yet I found him to be quite a sympathetic, thoughtful man. I found him stiff in many ways but a perfectly sensible, intelligent man who did his best. He was by no means the villain he was made out to be. My purpose in writing about him was to show the other side of the Revolution in a sympathetic way. The personality of this man, his fate and tragedy interested me."
Bailyn has always been fascinated by the level of creativity exhibited by the Founding Fathers and has spent a lifetime trying to "get closer to their interior world by looking at the circumstances they lived in." The Founding Fathers, he says, "remade the political structure of life. People like my friend Hutchinson, who didn't handle it well, paid for it. Today, we live in the solid construction that they made. We don't have the sense that we have to rethink the whole world as they did. "
For many years, Bailyn has differentiated in his historical research between what he calls a "manifest event" and a "latent event." "A manifest event," he said, "is an event that people of the time knew about, whereas a latent event is one people didn't know about at the time."
In fact, the evaluation of statistics in the form of demographic studies often reveals latent events. "No one, for instance, was writing headlines in the 1700s in England about the slow, gradual decline of the family structure, but now we have the latent history of the family through demographics."
Bailyn believes he was the first historian to publish a book based entirely on computers. In 1959, he wrote "Massachusetts Shipping," a statistical study based loosely on computers.
"Of course, in 1959," says Bailyn, "there were no computers. We had tabulators and punch cards with holes in them. They went through brushes of wires and when electronic contact was made, you got a printout. My book on Massachusetts shipping at the end of the 17th century was based on this, and today, only the first chapter is used for anything, and that is to show how dumb you can be."
The only school at Harvard to engage in actual tabulation in the late 1950s, says Bailyn, was the College of Education. "We used their machine from midnight until 4 o'clock in the morning. When we got a printout, we had to convert it into a table. One time we made a marvelous table. It was unbelievable for what it showed. It seemed one of the great discoveries of modern historiography. But when we checked out the machine afterward, we found that some of the wires were crooked. They went through the wrong holes! So this wonderful graph about Boston merchants was, in fact, rubbish."
While this episode is amusing now in today's advanced computer age, Bailyn was trying to get at something that the people of the time could not possibly have known -- namely, the configuration of ship ownership.
"I wanted to know if it was the same group of people who repeatedly got together in ship ownership or whether it was a constant flow of tiny interests. If the same three or four people always owned ships together, there was a greater confidence in the ability to avoid risk. But there was no computer program to be used for this. You plugged in these wires like an old telephone. Now you could program something like that. But what we were trying to measure was a latent event."
Bailyn said that his favorite book is always the one he's working on at the moment. His current project is a study of migration in the 17th century, for which the modern use of the computer is proving very helpful.
Bailyn is also the director of the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, in which he annually brings together numerous scholars from several nations and 27 universities to discuss the early westward expansion of the Atlantic countries.
The intent of the seminars is "to encourage young historians who are interested in Atlantic history during its formative years and how it relates to the United States. Scholars from France, Britain, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom join together to discuss their research findings."
According to Hinderaker, this seminar exemplifies Bailyn's uncanny ability to "create a new hot area of historical research. You hear the phrase, 'Atlantic World' everywhere now."