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January 11, 2006
Executive Summary & Future Research Opportunity?
[Scroll to the bottom of this post for the Executive Summary of the Oxford & York Conference, "Media and Technology in the Age of the Blogger," which I attended in New York in October.]
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I'm starting a new book:
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
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 . . .And from the preface:. . . 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 reveal motive and understanding: the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas -- the articulated world view -- 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.
Study of the pamphlets confirmed my rather old-fashioned view that the American Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle, and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of society of the economy.
. . . the spokesmen of the Revolution -- the pamphleteers, essayists, and miscellaneous commentators -- were not philosophers and they did not form a detached intelligentsia. They were active politicians, merchants, lawyers, plantation owners, and preachers, and they were not attempting to align their thought with that of major figures in the history of political philosophy whom modern scholars would declare to have been seminal . . . They would have been surprised to hear that they had fallen into so neat a pattern in the history of political thought. They believed that any political system, certainly all republics, had to be based in some significant degree on virtue, but they had no illusions about the virtue of ordinary people, and all of them believed in the basic value of personal property, its preservation and the fostering of economic growth. They were both "civic humanists" and "liberals," though with different emphases at different times and in different circumstances. And indeed it is the flexibility of their ideas, the complex variations that could be harmoniously composed on the main themes, that has proven the most impressive product of the later studies of Revolutionary ideology.
Google Blog Search: bloggers pamphleteers
bloggers pampleteers - Google Search
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For those who are interested, here's a PDF Executive Summary from the conference I attended in October, "Media and Technology in the Age of the Blogger". It's about 700kb, which will eat up my bandwidth, so first come, first served, until I start running out of my monthly quota. Then I'll be happy to forward it to anyone who requests by email. I think it's a great document, summing up the gist of each panel, and the major themes in each, very well:
This is my first PDF, so if it doesn't work . . . I'll have to give it another shot.
UPDATE: Thanks to Sparky at Developer Food for letting me use his site and bandwidth to continue hosting this document.
Posted by Chester at January 11, 2006 9:29 PM
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