Gordon S. Wood, who wrote award-winning books such as “The Creation of the American Republic,” has died after being hit by a car in a Rhode Island supermarket parking lot.
Wood was 92 years old.
The Associated Press called Wood “the eminent and prolific scholar who forged a highly influential and sharply debated narrative of the country’s early years of independence.”
The author was a professor emeritus at Brown University.
The AP noted that Wood, while a prolific writer, did not have the same mass-audience fame as other historians, such as David McCollough, did, but his writings became references for discussions about the origins of the U.S. and the revolution.
Wood wrote in his book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” that the patriots were not rebelling just against “taxation without representation,” but also the old world view that commoners were divided from those of noble birth, The New York Times reported.
Woods wrote, “Liberty, insubordination and unwillingness to truckle to any authority were what distinguished Englishmen from Frenchmen and all the other enslaved and deprived peoples of the world.”
He went on to argue, “The English were habitually defiant of authority, and no one at the top of any of the English-speaking world’s many hierarchies ever felt as secure as he would have liked.”
But despite his expertise, Wood came under fire by younger historians who claimed he was old-school and minimized the lives of enslaved people, women, and Indigenous people.
Ohio State University professor John Brooke said Wood had "a distinct avoidance of interpretative paradox and complexity,” while still citing the latter’s works in his own.
Despite Brooke’s assertions, Wood wrote in “Empire of Liberty” that slavery was a cancer “eating away at the message of liberty and equality.”
But he also spoke out against the 1619 Project, saying it encouraged a sense of “victimhood” and feeling “aggrieved,” despite admitting not reading most of the Pulitzer Prize-winning piece by the Times, the AP reported.
Among his many awards, former President Barack Obama presented Wood with a National Humanities Medal “for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.”
He noted that the founding fathers were driven by their rivalries rather than being statesmen, and that the “all men are created equal” belief written in the Declaration of Independence didn’t always live by that credo, using connections and social standing to advance their views.
Wood also said they were aware of the task at hand when building a new country and new government: “No generation in American history has ever been so self-conscious about the moral and social values necessary for public leadership,” the Times noted.
Brandeis University professor emeritus of history, David Hackett Fischer, said, “Always, Wood’s purpose was not to celebrate or condemn these leaders, but to understand them. His results lead us beyond the hagiographers who celebrate the founders as demigods, and iconoclasts who revile them as racists and sexists, an approach Wood believes to be inaccurate and anachronistic.”
His most recent book was “Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution,” published in 2021, and called the 1760s to the early 1800s, “the most creative period of constitutionalism in American history and one of the most creative in modern Western history,” according to the Times.
Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the same town as other writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott. He, however, thought high school history classes were unbearable, especially when teachers just read from textbooks. His Latin instructor encouraged him to attend Tufts University, where he graduated summa cum laude. He earned his master’s and Ph. D. from Harvard and studied under historian Bernard Bailyn, who examined the intellectual forces behind the revolution, the AP reported.
Wood was married to his wife, Louise, and the couple had three children, two of whom followed their father’s footsteps into the history classroom. They also had five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter, the Times reported.
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