Gordon S. Wood, pioneering historian of early America, dies at 92

Gordon S. Wood, a historian whose decades of research and writing established him as one of the country’s preeminent scholars of the American Revolution, the personalities of the Founding Fathers and the early years of the new republic, died June 7 in Providence, Rhode Island. He was 92.

His daughter, Amy Wood, said he died at a hospital after being struck by a motorist in East Providence.

A professor emeritus of history at Brown University, where he had taught since 1969, Wood has been described by fellow historians as doing as much as anyone to deepen understanding and change perceptions of the forces and events that led to the birth of the United States.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” published in 1992, he wrote that the colonists were not rebelling just against “taxation without representation” and other supposed injustices imposed on them from across the Atlantic. Whether they knew it or not, they were also rising up against an age-old worldview in which common people were forever divided from those of noble birth.

Wood argued that, ironically, the colonists wanted to cut ties with Britain not because they were so different from the English but, in part, because they were so much like them.

“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,” Wood wrote. “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.”

In this sense, he asserted, the colonists “were more English than the English themselves.”

Wood saw the Founding Fathers not as figures in a statuary hall but as men driven by rivalries both political and personal, susceptible to venality and snobbery and sometimes perfectly willing to prosper through connections and social standing, notwithstanding the “all men are created equal” passage in the Declaration of Independence.

Yet, for Wood, the men who wrote and signed the declaration and the Constitution, and those who took the reins of the fledgling government, were towering figures: “No generation in American history has ever been so self-conscious about the moral and social values necessary for public leadership.”

As David Hackett Fischer, a professor emeritus of history at Brandeis University, put it in a 2011 review of Wood’s “The Idea of America,” a collection of essays: “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.”

Digging deep into documents and correspondence from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and absorbing the work of other scholars, Wood wrote about a dozen books and many articles and book reviews on the Revolution and the early years of the United States.

“The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787,” published in 1969, was nominated for a National Book Award. “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815” was a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2010. His other honors included a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama in 2011.

His name may have been most widely known, though, for being included in a memorable monologue that Matt Damon’s title character delivers in the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting,” skewering a Harvard University student’s academic pretensions. Soon, Will says, “you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about, you know, the prerevolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.”

As Wood told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2015, “That’s my two seconds of fame. More kids know about that than any of the books I have written.”

Gordon Stewart Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on Nov. 27, 1933, to working-class parents, Herbert G. Wood and Marion (Friberg) Wood. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1955, served in the Air Force in Japan, and then earned a doctorate in history at Harvard, studying under Bernard Bailyn, a leading historian of the Revolutionary War era. Before joining the Brown faculty, he taught at Harvard, the College of William and Mary and the University of Michigan.

Wood married Louise Goss in 1956. In addition to their daughter Amy, a professor of history at Illinois State University, she survives him, along with their son, Christopher, a professor of German at New York University; another daughter, Elizabeth Wood; five grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. His sister, Beverly DeCoster, died in 2017.

Wood was an active participant in public debates about the moral status of the American past. In 2019, after the publication by The New York Times Magazine of “The 1619 Project,” an examination of the legacy of slavery, the Times published a letter signed by Wood and other eminent American historians, including James M. McPherson and Sean Wilentz.

The letter asserted that the project contained “factual errors” that, taken together, “suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wood discussed his criticisms at length in an interview published around the same time by the World Socialist Web Site. (Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Magazine, denied that the project contained “significant factual errors” and argued that it was driven by “historical understanding,” not ideology.)

A new collection of Wood’s essays will be published next year. His most recent book, published in 2021, was “Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution,” in which he described the period from the 1760s to the early 1800s as “the most creative period of constitutionalism in American history and one of the most creative in modern Western history.” In a review for the Times, journalist and historian Richard Stengel described the book as “a summing up of his life’s work” distinguished by “an elegiac quality along with his customary clarity.”

Wood distilled what he found exceptional in the revolutionary period in “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.” “To base a society on the commonplace behavior of ordinary people,” he wrote, “may be obvious and understandable to us today, but it was momentously radical in the long sweep of world history up to that time.”

Yet, to a greater extent than is often taught in history classes, the founders were disillusioned by what they had wrought. The early nation’s political disputes seemed less high-minded to the founders than the ones they themselves had engaged in. The founders were also disturbed by the lack of sophistication of ordinary early Americans: their remarkably high consumption of homegrown whiskey and their tendency to settle disputes not in court but with fists, knives and guns, especially on the frontier.

“A new generation of democratic Americans was no longer interested in the revolutionaries’ dream of building a classical republic of elitist virtue out of the inherited materials of the Old World,” Wood wrote. “Instead, it would discover its greatness by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns.”

In “The Idea of America,” he observed: “If the study of history teaches anything, it teaches us the limitations of life. It ought to produce prudence and humility.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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