Wood, an Emeritus Professor at Brown University, died on June 7 aged 92, after being struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot. The author of dozens of books and essays, Wood never gained the mass audience of historians like David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin, but his findings became standard references for discussions about the formation of the United States and the legacy of the Revolution. Many peers regarded the white-haired, mild-looking Wood as the embodiment of the learned, traditional historian, guided by
facts rather than ideology. In 2011, President Barack Obama presented him a National Humanities Medal ‘‘for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the US Constitution’’. Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts. His passion for the subject he later mastered did not arise until college: Wood found his high school history education unbearable, suffering through classes in which the teacher simply read from a textbook. However, Wood did admire his Latin instructor, who encouraged him to attend Tufts
University, from which he graduated summa cum laude. He received a master’s and PhD from Harvard University and studied under a celebrated Revolutionary War historian Bernard Bailyn, whose documentation of the intellectual forces behind independence in his landmark The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Wood would build upon in The Creation of the American Republic. That work, Woods’ first, was an immediate and lasting success. It won the Bancroft Prize in 1970 and lived on with generations of students who embraced and contended with
Wood’s findings that the constitution was unintentionally subversive, a document devised by elites that led to ‘‘the destruction of the very social world they had sought to maintain’’. His The Radicalism of the American Revolution won the Pulitzer in 1993 and the epic work Empire of Liberty was a finalist in 2009. Wood’s name also was familiar to moviegoers through the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting. The lead character, a pugnacious, self-taught genius played by Matt Damon, taunts a Harvard undergraduate: ‘‘You’re gonna be in
here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilisation.’’ (Ideas, Wood would point out, that he did not endorse). Wood was a self-described ‘‘simple hedgehog’’ who stuck to writing about the Revolution, which he regarded as ‘‘the most important event in American history, bar none’’. He was unhappy that students attending college knew far more about the Civil War, noting it was impossible to understand any US conflict without understanding the country’s birth. ‘‘We Americans have
such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it,’’ he once wrote. Regarding himself as neither radical nor reactionary, Wood claimed a middle ground between conventional ‘‘great man’’ narratives and the more egalitarian scholarship that emerged in the 1960s. He acknowledged historians had overlooked the contributions of women and minority groups, but worried that ‘‘headline political events’’ were being ignored entirely. He disputed Progressive era historian Charles Beard’s influential portrait of the US Constitution as a cynical triumph
for the rich, but did not regard the founders as infallible sages above looking after their own interests. ‘‘I don’t think our history should be seen as a moral tale, either good or bad,’’ he once wrote. ‘‘I think historians should try to understand where we came from as honestly as we can, without trying to say this was a great celebration or that this was a disaster. I don’t think either of those extremes is true of our history.’’ Wood did welcome scholarly breakthroughs,
notably Annette Gordon-Reed’s ‘‘persuasive contextual case’’ that the enslaved Sally Hemings bore some of Thomas Jefferson’s children. In Empire of Liberty, which covered the years 1789 to 1815, he included lengthy passages on slavery and called it a cancer ‘‘eating away at the message of liberty and equality’’. At other times, Wood angrily resisted new approaches. He was a prominent critic of The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project and its contention — later amended — that maintaining slavery was a key motivation for
the Revolution. He countered that the founders, including such plantation owners as Jefferson and James Madison, believed — mistakenly — that slavery would die a natural death and the Revolution itself energised the American abolitionist movement. ‘‘We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth,’’ he wrote in 2019. ‘‘I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves.’’ Wood’s other books included Revolutionary Characters and The Americanisation of Benjamin Franklin. In his introduction to
The Idea of America, published in 2011, Wood looked back on his own work and the evolution of scholarship in his lifetime. He noted the many errors of the country’s founders but warned against scolding historical figures because of mistakes which seem obvious now — what he and others call ‘‘Presentism’’. ‘‘The drama, indeed the tragedy of history, comes from our understanding of the tension that existed between the conscious wills and intentions of the participants in the past and the underlying conditions that constrained
their actions and shaped their future,’’ he wrote. ‘‘If the study of history teaches anything, it teaches us the limitations of life. It ought to produce prudence and humility.’’ — AP
Gordon S. Wood, Brown University, historian, American Revolution, US Constitution, National Humanities Medal, Pulitzer Prize, Empire of Liberty, 1619 Project