Bailyn, Bernard. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson

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Harvard University Press: Cambridge (MA), 1974.  First Edition of this winner of the 1975 National Book Award in History.

Inscribed "with best regards", signed and dated by the author.  The recipient, a student pursuing his MPA at Harvard where Bailyn was a professor at the time, had previously written in his name and date, hence a difference in hand-writing in the inscription.

Spine a bit creased but book is tight and seemingly unread. Near fine in little rubbed, near fine dust wrapper.

Books signed by Bailyn are scarce indeed.

Few historians since World War II have left an imprint on that field of study that rivals Professor Bailyn’s.  In his classic 1967 work, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” Bailyn reshaped the study of the origins of the American Revolution, maintaining that the ideology of liberty and freedom was ingrained in the colonists, displacing Charles A Beard's then dominant theory that the American Revolution was primarily a matter of class warfare and that the rhetoric of freedom was meaningless. 

On topic after topic, in more than 20 books that he wrote or edited, Bailyn shifted the direction of scholarly inquiry, in the process winning two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, a Bancroft Prize (the most prestigious award given to scholars of American history) and, in 2011, the National Humanities Medal.