Bernard Bailyn’s time at Williams was cut short by World War II. He left in 1943 to serve in the army and received his diploma in 1945. He then earned his Ph.D. in history at Harvard, where he spent his whole career as one of the country’s most influential historians. The author of a dozen books, he won his first Pulitzer Prize for “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” (1968), which shifted attention on the motivations of the revolution from economic to ideological. His second Pulitzer was for “Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution” (1986). The book was based in significant part on the use of new computer technology to analyze a register in London’s Public Record Office of every British resident who migrated to the colonies in the three years before the revolution. He complemented this statistical record with lyrical accounts of individual immigrants. He is also former president of the American Historical Association.