Gordon S. Wood

Gordon Stewart Wood (November 27, 1933 – June 7, 2026) was an American historian and academic who was a professor at Brown University. He was a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution. His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969) won the 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.

Early life and education Gordon Stewart Wood was born on November 27, 1933, in Concord, Massachusetts, to Marion (Friberg) and Herbert G. Wood. He grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University in 1955 and served as a trustee there. While serving in the United States Air Force in Japan, he obtained a Master of Arts in history from Harvard University. After finishing his service, he obtained his Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1964 under Bernard Bailyn. and became the basis for his 1969 book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787.

Career Early in his career, Wood taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. In 1969, he joined the faculty of Brown University where he was Professor of History and Alva O. Way University Professor.

In addition to his books (listed below), Wood wrote numerous articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966), "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century" (1982), and "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution" (1987). He was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.

He wrote the third volume of the Oxford History of the United States – Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wood was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988 and the American Philosophical Society in 1994.

In popular culture

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich publicly and effusively praised Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). Wood, who met Gingrich once in 1994, surmised that Gingrich may have approved because the book "had a kind of Tocquevillian touch to it, I guess, maybe suggesting American exceptionalism, that he liked". He jokingly described Gingrich's praise in an interview on C-SPAN in 2002 as "the kiss of death for me among a lot of academics, who are not right-wing Republicans".

Wood was mentioned in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. In one scene, Matt Damon's character mentions Gordon Wood while standing up to a Harvard student who is ridiculing Ben Affleck's character at a bar. He accuses the Harvard student of shallowly reiterating ideas he has encountered in his coursework, telling him that soon he would be "regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about... the pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization". Wood said of the scene, "That's my two seconds of fame! More kids know about that than any of the books I have written."

The “Good Will Hunting” scene was later referenced in the television show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, with the character Charlie trying to pull a similar rhetorical trick to Damon’s character and repeating Wood’s name several times before asking “Does no one know who Gordon Wood is?”

Personal life and death Wood married Louise Goss on April 30, 1956. They had three children, including Christopher, an art historian.

Works Books

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1969 and reissued 1998. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. The American Revolution: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2001. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. New York: Penguin, 2011. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin, 2017. Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Pamphlets and lectures Revolution and the Political Integration of the Enslaved and Disenfranchised. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1974. The Making of the Constitution. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1987. Monarchism and Republicanism in the Early United States. (Melbourne, Australia: La Trobe University, 2000.

Co-author (With J. R. Pole) Social Radicalism and the Idea of Equality in the American Revolution. Houston, Texas: University of St. Thomas, 1976. (With others) The Great Republic. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977; 4th ed.: Lexington, Massachusetts: Heath, 1992.

Book chapters Leadership in the American Revolution. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1974. Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture. Peter Onuf and Jan Lewis (eds.), Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1999. To the Best of My Ability: The American Presidency. James M. McPherson (ed.). New York: Society of American Historians, 2000. "Can the United States Be One People?" Our American Story. Joshua Claybourn (ed.), Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books, 2019.

As editor Representation in the American Revolution. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1969. The Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820. New York: George Braziller, 1971. Rev. ed.: Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990. The Confederation and the Constitution. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. With Louise G. Wood. Russian-American Dialogue on the American Revolution. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1995. With Paul A. Gilje et al. Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic. Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. With Anthony Molho. Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998. John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1755–1783 (2 vols.). New York: The Library of America, 2011. The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776 (2 vols.). New York: The Library of America, 2015. John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826. New York: The Library of America, 2016.

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