Bernard Bailyn was an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard starting in 1953. Bailyn 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, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.