Carl Bridenbaugh was an American historian of Colonial America. He had an illustrious career, writing fourteen books and editing or co-editing five more, and he was acclaimed as a historian and teacher.
Bridenbaugh is best known for his two major books on colonial cities: Cities in the Wilderness-The First Century of Urban Life in America 1625–1742 and Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776. In them he examined in depth five key cities: Boston, Newport Rhode Island, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charles Town,. He argues they grew from small villages to take major leadership roles in promoting trade, land speculation, immigration, and prosperity, and in disseminating the ideas of the Enlightenment, and new methods in medicine and technology. Furthermore, they sponsored a consumer taste for English amenities, developed a distinctly American educational system, and began systems for care of people meeting welfare. The cities were not remarkable by European standards, but they did display certain distinctly American characteristics, according to Bridenbaugh. There was no aristocracy or established church, there was no long tradition of powerful guilds. The colonial governments were much less powerful and intrusive and corresponding national governments in Europe. They experimented with new methods to raise revenue, build infrastructure and to solve urban problems. They were more democratic than European cities, in that a large fraction of the men could vote, and class lines were more fluid. Contrasted to Europe, printers had a much larger role in shaping public opinion, and lawyers moved easily back and forth between politics and their profession. Bridenbaugh argues that by the mid-18th century, the middle-class businessmen, professionals, and skilled artisans dominated the cities. He characterizes them as "sensible, shrewd, frugal, ostentatiously moral, generally honest," public spirited, and upwardly mobile, and argues their economic strivings led to "democratic yearnings" for political power. He stirred a sharp debate regarding his possible anti-Semitism with his AHA presidential address asserting that urban academics—which many academics read as "Jewish"—were unsuited to study Colonial American history because they did not understand rural culture. He created further debate about his condemnation of non-WASP historians "Today imaginations have become starved or stunted, and wit and humor, let alone laughter and a healthy frivolity, are seldom encountered. Furthermore, many of the younger practitioners of our craft, and those who are still apprentices, are products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions."
