Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Bibliographical Essay
The indispensable, and still unchallenged, overall study for this period is the
monumental four-volume work by Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in
the Eighteenth Century (1924-25). Also useful are the latter volumes of Charles
M. Andrews' four-volume The Colonial Period of American History (1934-38).
A particularly useful text on colonial America is David Hawke's The Colonial
Experience (1966). Older but still valuable is Oliver P. Chitwood, A History of
Colonial America (lsted., 1931; 3rded., 1961).
The most notable advance in many years in the historiography of the first half
of eighteenth-century America, is the discovery of the great extent and depth of
the growth and spread of libertarian thought, influenced particularly by radical
libertarian English writers during this period. The discovery was made by Professor
Bernard Bailyn, particularly in his The Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution (1967) and his The Origins of American Politics (1968). The
Ideological Origins is an expansion of Bailyn's first work on the subject, his
"General Introduction" to Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Pamphlets of the American
Revolution, vol. 1 (1965). An excellent selection from the most influential of
the English libertarian writings, co-authored by John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon, may be found in David L. Jacobson, ed., The English Libertarian Heritage
(1965). The Jacobson volume contains selections from Gordon and Trenchard's
Cato's Letters, their most influential essays; and from their essays in The Independent
Whig, in behalf of religious liberty. Both series were published in the early 1720s.
Jacobson's "Introduction" is a useful survey of the life and work of Trenchard and
Gordon. Bailyn's findings were based on the pioneering and monumental work of
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (1959), which
"discovered" not only Trenchard and Gordon, but also the line of descent from
Algernon Sidney and Locke down to the radical libertarians of the eighteenth
century.
The libertarian influence of John Locke on American thought has long been
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