The Great Republic: A History of the American People, Volume Two

Bernard Bailyn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1922, and did his undergraduate work at Williams College. He began his teaching career at Harvard University immediately after the university granted him a Ph.D. in 1953, and he remained there until he retired in 1991. During his tenure at Harvard, he was Winthrop Professor, Adams University show more Professor, and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. For years Bailyn was editor in chief of the Harvard Library and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. An innovative and influential historian of early America, Bernard Bailyn has written quantitative studies of the colonial New England economy, probing examinations of the ideological origins of the American Revolution, and penetrating studies of the social and cultural foundations of American education. Bailyn is particularly adept at interweaving social, intellectual, economic, and political factors into coherent narrative history. A pioneer in adapting the new tools of social science to the writing of history, he is also a fine literary stylist. Bailyn has been Pitt Professor at Cambridge University and president of the American Historical Association. He holds membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in the British Academy. His writings have earned him the Bancroft Prize and the National Book Award. Bailyn received two Pulitzers-one in 1968 for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which challenges traditional interpretations of the causes of the American Revolution, and the other in 1987 for Voyagers to the West (1986), which explores reasons for migration to America just prior to the Revolution. His other work includes The Barbarous Years (2013) and Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades (2020). Bernard Bailyn, author of over 20 books, died on August 7, 2020 at the age of 97. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Robert Dallek is the author of Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White Home; An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963; and Nixon and Kissinger, among other books. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, and Vanity Fair. Dallek is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the show more Society of American Historians, for which he served as president in 2004-2005. He lives in Washington, D.C. show less

David Brion Davis was born in Denver, Colorado on February 16, 1927. After Army service in postwar occupied Germany, he received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dartmouth College in 1950 and a Ph.D. in American history from Harvard University in 1956. He taught at Dartmouth and Cornell University before moving to Yale University in 1970. He show more was awarded a Sterling professorship in 1978 and was the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition in 1998. He retired from teaching full time in 2001. He wrote or edited 16 books during his lifetime including Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860: A Study in Social Values; Slavery and Human Progress; In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery; and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, a National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize in 1976 for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. He died on April 14, 2019 at the age of 92. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian David Herbert Donald was born October 1, 1920 in Goodman, Miss. He married Aida DiPace in 1955, they had one child, Bruce Randall. He received an A.B. in 1941 from Millsaps College; an A.M. in 1942, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1946. Donald has been an associate professor of history show more at Smith College and a professor of history at Columbia University; Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University. He was also Harry C. Warren Professor of American History, chair of the graduate program in American civilization, and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Much of Donald's work involves exploring and interpreting the American Civil War and its central figure, Abraham Lincoln. Some recent works includes Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe, Lincoln, and Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 1996. He received Pulitzer Prizes in biography for both Charles Sumner and Look Homeward. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

John L. Thomas is the George L. Littlefield Professor of American History at Brown University

History professor and award-winning author Gordon S. Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts on November 27, 1933. After graduating in 1955 from Tufts University he served in the US Air Force in Japan and earned his master's degree from Harvard University. In 1964, Wood earned his Ph. D. in history from Harvard, and he taught there, as well as at show more the College of William and Mary and the University of Michigan, before joining the Brown University faculty in 1969. Wood has published a number of articles and books, including The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. He has won many other awards in the past five decades from organizations such as the American Historical Association, the New York Historical Society, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum. Wood is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 2014, his book, The American Revolution: A History, was on the New York Times bestseller list. (Bowker Author Biography) show less