![]() He then goes on to point to Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s famous views of Rome as emblematic of the sentiment towards the ancient world that lurked behind the American colonies’ decision to break with the British crown. Quoting the letters’ assertion that “words are too weak” to express the magnitude of the impact of the history of ancient Rome on the 18th century republican mind, Bailyn wonders if pictures might come closer to the mark. ![]() Towards the end of his retrospection, Bailyn underlines the importance of the reception of ancient Roman republicanism among the American revolutionaries and cites one of the most well-known expressions of whiggish sentiment of the time-Trenchard and Gordon’s essays from the 1720s known as Cato’s Letters. In the preface to the 50th anniversary edition of his Pulitzer prize winning study, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn reflects back on his book’s original argument of 1967, one based on an unprecedented attention to the language and rhetoric of the manifold political pamphlets that circulated in the American colonies between 17. ![]()
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