New York — Gordon S. Wood, the eminent and prolific scholar who penned the highly influential book W A novel subject to intense debate The early years of the country’s independence were marked by such award-winning works as The Creation of the American Republic and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. He was 92 years old.
Wood, a professor emeritus at Brown University, died Sunday after being struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot in East Providence, Rhode Island, according to police.
The author of dozens of books and articles, Wood has never gained as large an audience among historians as he has David McCullough and Doris Kearns GoodwinBut his findings have become standard references for discussions about the formation and legacy of the United States Revolution. The white-haired, genial Wood was considered by many of his peers to be the embodiment of the educated traditional historian, guided by facts rather than ideology.
In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal for the Humanities “for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the Constitution of the United States.”
In recent years, younger academics have increasingly claimed that Wood was too entrenched, an example of an old-school historian who trivialized the lives of slaves, women, and indigenous people. John L. may blame him. Brock, a professor of history at Ohio State University, for his “clear avoidance of interpretive paradox and complexity,” even as he cited Wood’s “scale and academic enterprise.”
In an email to The Associated Press, director Ken Burns praised Wood as “a mentor to generations of students and other historians.”
Woody Holton, an author and historian who sometimes clashed with Wood, told the AP that he admired “his desire to encourage even a younger scholar like me who saw the American revolutionary era very differently than he did.”
Holton, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, added, “The tragic accident that claimed the man’s life was particularly heartbreaking because it deprived him, in less than a month, of the opportunity to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country.”
His success was immediate and lasting. His first book, The Creation of the American Republic, won the Bancroft Prize in 1970, and he lived among generations of students who both embraced and opposed Wood’s findings that the Constitution was unintentionally subversive, a document created by elites that led to “the destruction of the very social world they sought to preserve.”
His book “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and his epic “Empire of Liberty” was a finalist in 2009.
Wood’s name was also familiar to moviegoers from the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, released in 1997. The main character, a feisty, self-taught genius, played by Matt Damon, quips a Harvard student: “You’ll be here vomiting Gordon Wood, talking about pre-revolutionary utopia and the effects of military mobilization on capital formation.” (Ideas, as Wood points out, he did not endorse.)
A few years ago, Wood received unexpected and uncomfortable praise from then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who listed The Radicalism of the American Revolution as an essential work of history. Wood will remember how the Georgia Republican’s blessing was the “kiss of death” among his many liberal peers and was seen as validation of conservative policies.
Wood considered himself neither a radical nor a reactionary, and claimed a middle ground between traditional “Great Man” narratives and the more egalitarian scholarship that emerged in the 1960s.
He acknowledged that historians had ignored the contributions of women and minorities, but expressed concern that “key political events” were being ignored entirely. He objected to Progressive Era historian Charles Byrd’s influential portrait of the U.S. Constitution as a cynical triumph for the rich, but he did not view the Founders as infallible sages above looking after their own interests.
“I do not believe that our history should be viewed as a morality tale, whether good or bad,” he once wrote. “I think historians should try to understand where we come from as honestly as possible, without trying to say that this was a great celebration or that it was a disaster. I don’t think either extreme applies to our history.”
Wood welcomed scientific breakthroughs, most notably the “convincing contextual case” presented by Annette Gordon Reed that the enslaved Sally Hemings fathered some of Thomas Jefferson’s children. In his book “The Empire of Liberty,” which covered the years 1789 to 1815, he included long paragraphs about slavery and described it as a cancer “that eats away the message of freedom and equality.”
At other times, Wood angrily resisted new methods. He was one of the most prominent critics of The New York Times winning the Pulitzer Prize Project 1619 Its claim – later modified – was that the preservation of slavery was a major motivation for the American Revolution. He claimed that the project encouraged feelings of “victimhood” and a sense of “injustice”, even as he admitted that he had not read most of it. He would have responded that the founders, including plantation owners like Jefferson and W James MadisonHe believed – wrongly – that slavery would die a natural death and that the Revolution itself helped revitalize the American abolitionist movement.
“We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth,” he wrote in 2019, adding in a widely controversial statement: “I know of no colonizer who said he wanted independence in order to keep his slaves.”
In Radicalism and other books, Wood rejected both conservative and liberal theories that the American Revolution did not immediately lead to any substantive new freedoms, and that it was primarily a political event—a mere “mental shift”—that reinforced the status quo.
Wood stated that the early years of the new state were a time of transformation and democratization of everything, from the way people dressed to the way they greeted each other in the streets. The transformations were so profound that the leaders of the revolution neither expected nor wanted them.
“No class overthrew another, nor did the poor replace the rich,” Wood wrote. “But social relations – the way people related to each other – changed decisively. By the early years of the nineteenth century, the Revolution had created a society radically different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century. It was in fact a new society unlike any that had existed anywhere in the world.”
Fellow historian and Pulitzer Prize winner David Hackett Fisher later wrote that Wood’s scholarship “changed the way historians think about their field.”
Wood’s other books included Revolutionary Figures and The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin and his articles and reviews appeared frequently in the New York Review of Books, The New Republic and other publications. Wood also consulted on Burns’s PBS documentary on Jefferson and chaired an advisory committee for the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Wood married Louise Goss in 1956. They had three children, two of whom became history professors.
Gordon Wood was a self-described “simple urchin” who stuck to writing about the Revolution, which he considered “the most important event in American history, bar none.” He was not happy that students attending the university knew so much about the Civil War, noting that it was impossible to understand any American conflict without understanding the country’s birth.
“We Americans have such a weak and poor sense of history that we cannot get much of it,” he once wrote.
Wood was born into history: his birthplace, Concord, Massachusetts, was the residence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott, among others. But his passion for the subject, which he later mastered, only developed in college. Wood found teaching history in high school unbearable, suffering through classes in which the teacher simply read from a textbook.
Wood was impressed by his Latin teacher, who encouraged him to attend Tufts University, from which he graduated summa cum laude. He earned a master’s and doctorate. from Harvard University and studied under the famous Revolutionary War historian Bernard Bailyn, whose documentation of the intellectual forces behind independence in his famous book “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” Wood would build on in his book The Creation of the American Republic.
In his introduction to The Idea of America, published in 2011, Wood looked back at his works and the development of scientific knowledge during his lifetime. He pointed to the many mistakes made by the country’s founders, but warned against rebuking historical figures for mistakes that seem obvious now, which he and others call “presentism.”
“The drama, indeed the tragedy, of history,” he wrote, “comes from our understanding of the tension that existed between the conscious wills and intentions of participants in the past and the underlying conditions that constrained their actions and shaped their future.”
“If the study of history teaches us anything, it teaches us the limits of life. It must produce wisdom and humility.”
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AP writer Michael Casey contributed to this report from Boston.