Gordon S. Wood
Gordon Stewart Wood is an American historian and university professor at Brown University. He is 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 won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
Early life and education
Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1955 and has served as a trustee there. After serving in the United States Air Force in Japan, during which time he earned an A.M. at Harvard University, he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard, where he studied under Bernard Bailyn, receiving his Ph.D. in 1964.Career
Wood has taught at Harvard University, the College of William and Mary, the University of Michigan, Brown University, and in 1982–83 was Pitt Professor at Cambridge University.In addition to his books, Wood has written numerous influential articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution", "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth century", and "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution". He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.
A recent project was the third volume of the Oxford History of the United States – Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story, Wood addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative. He focused on the idea of equality as "the most radical and most powerful ideological force" that the American Revolution unleashed. "This powerful sense of equality is still alive and well in America, and despite all of its disturbing and unsettling consequences, it is what makes us one people."
Wood was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988.
In popular culture
publicly and effusively praised Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood, who met Gingrich once in 1994, surmised that Gingrich may have approved because the book "had a kind of Toquevillian 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 bullying 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." This scene was later parodied by the television show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in which the character Charlie Kelly attempts to "pull a Good Will Hunting" and asks "does no one know who Gordon Wood is?"
Personal life
Wood married the former Louise Goss on April 30, 1956. They have three children: Christopher, Elizabeth and Amy. Their son, Christopher Wood, is a professor of German at New York University and their daughter, Amy, is a professor of history at Illinois State University, and Elizabeth is an administrator at Milton Academy.Publications
- The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, University of North Carolina Press, 1969, 1998.
- Representation in the American Revolution, University of Virginia Press, 1969.
- The Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820, George Braziller, 1971, revised edition, Northeastern University Press, 1990.
- The Confederation and the Constitution, Little, Brown, 1973.
- Revolution and the Political Integration of the Enslaved and Disenfranchised, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974.
- Leadership in the American Revolution, Library of Congress, 1974.
- Social Radicalism and the Idea of Equality in the American Revolution, University of St. Thomas, 1976.
- The Great Republic, Little, Brown, 1977, 4th edition, Heath, 1992.
- The Making of the Constitution, Baylor University Press, 1987.
- Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820, Northeastern University Press, 1990.
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
- Russian-American Dialogue on the American Revolution, University of Missouri Press, 1995.
- Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997.
- Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, Princeton University Press, 1998.
- Monarchism and Republicanism in the Early United States, La Trobe University, 2000.
- The American Revolution: A History, Modern Library, 2001.
- The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Penguin Press, 2004.
- Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, Penguin Press, 2006.
- The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, Penguin Press, 2008.
- , Oxford University Press, 2010.
- The Idea of America. Reflections on the Birth of the United States. Penguin Press, New York City, 2011.
- John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1755–1783, The Library of America, 2011.
- The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776, The Library of America, 2015.
- John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826, The Library of America, 2016.
- Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Penguin Books, 2017
- Book contributions
- * Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, edited by Peter Onuf and Jan Lewis, University of Virginia Press, 1999
- * To the Best of My Ability: The American Presidency, edited by James M. McPherson, Society of American Historians, 2000.
- * Our American Story, edited by Joshua Claybourn, Potomac Books, 2019.
- Contributor of articles to academic journals:
- * New England Quarterly
- * William and Mary Quarterly
- * American Historical Review
- * Virginia Quarterly Review
- * Washington and Lee Law Review
- * Virginia Law Review
- Contributor of book reviews to periodicals, including
- * New York Review of Books
- * The New York Times
- * The New Republic