Bailyn explains that this book emerged from a prior project when he was invited to prepare a collection of Revolutionary-era pamphlets for publication. Bailyn discovered that over 400 pamphlets related to the Anglo-American struggle were produced in the colonies through 1776. These pamphlets ranged from treatises on political history to sermons. Bailyn noticed that these writings shared a common characteristic: they were explanatory. The pamphlets revealed “an articulated world view—that lay behind the manifest events of the time” (vi). Bailyn viewed these writings as providing the ideological origins of the American Revolution. Bailyn’s study of the pamphlets confirmed his belief that the American Revolution was “above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of the society or the economy” (vi). Bailyn also notes that his examination of the pamphlets confirmed his view that it was the close relationship between the 18th-century colonists’ circumstances and Revolutionary thought that gave the Revolution its transformative force.

The pamphlets additionally shed new light on the sources of that Revolutionary thought. Bailyn asserts that the prominent ideological influence was a strain of anti-authoritarianism that had developed during the upheaval of the English Civil War and eventually applied to politics by early 18th-century opposition politicians and radical publicists in England.