Bernard Bailyn, an American historian, author and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era history, died August 7 at his home in Belmont, MA, a suburb of Boston. He was 97.

Bernard Bailyn was a professor at Harvard University beginning in 1953. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice — in 1968 and 1987. In 1998, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal.

In his research, professor Bailyn looked at merchants, demographic trends, Loyalists, international links across the Atlantic, and especially the political ideas that motivated the Patriots. He was best known for studies of Republicanism and Atlantic history that transformed the scholarship in those fields. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and sciences in 1963.