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Cover of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

How long does it take to read The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution?

Bernard Bailyn

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn takes about 6 hours 9 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 6 hours 9 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1967. 335 pages, about 92,125 words.

13 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 10 hours 14 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 6 hours 9 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 50 minutes

The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

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. The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred. In the end I concluded that no fewer than seventy-two of them ought to be re-published. But sheer numbers were not the most important measure of the magnitude of the project. 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 review motive and understanding: the assumptions, beliefs, and ideas -- the articulated worldview -- 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. - Foreword.

Subjects: History, Political science, Historia, Science politique, Histoire, Revolución

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