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Gordon S. Wood spent more than half a century explaining to Americans why their country was worth understanding.
He died on a Sunday in June, struck by a motorist in the parking lot of a Shaw’s supermarket on Taunton Avenue in East Providence, Rhode Island. According to the East Providence Police Department, he sustained critical injuries and later died at the hospital. He was 92.
His death came just weeks before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and it is a true tragedy that one of the most celebrated historians of the Revolution and the Founding did not live to see this milestone. Just last year Wood reached his largest audience yet thanks to his appearance in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary “The American Revolution.”
That his death should come on the eve of the semiquincentennial has weighed heavily on those who knew his work. Fellow historians and admirers have mourned that the man who spent his career illuminating the Revolution, for scholars and ordinary readers alike, would not be present for the anniversary he did so much to prepare the country to mark.
The grief has been personal as much as professional. John T. Lowe, a senior history lecturer at the University of Louisville, was set to meet Wood at Clemson University for the John Adams Fellowship, a two-week scholarly deep dive into the American Revolution.
“Wood embodied for me what it means to be a historian, someone who studies not just events but the ideals behind them,” Lowe said via email. “That I will never have the chance to meet the man whose work shaped my own is a loss I am always going to feel.”
Aaron N. Coleman of the University of the Cumberlands recalled fondly that Wood was the first scholar ever to cite him.
“As a then-young historian, it was a humbling experience,” Coleman said. “It was less than a year after I got my degree. I told him that two years ago and he just laughed. But I can’t think of any other scholar who a citation would mean more. At the same time, I worried that having Wood cite my work so fresh from my degree meant that my career had already peaked!”
One of Wood’s former doctoral students at Brown University, C. Bradley Thompson — author of “America’s Revolutionary Mind” and executive director of the Snow Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University — reflected on his mentor’s influence: “Gordon S. Wood was a gentleman and a scholar of the highest order. We will never see the likes of him again. May his memory be a blessing for all of us.'”
The outpouring from former students, colleagues, and admirers online has been tremendous. Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur now running for governor of Ohio, credited Wood on X with “shaping my understanding of the American founding,” adding that he and Wood “corresponded as recently as November about what makes America special.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis echoed Ramaswamy’s hope that the next generation of Americans would learn from Wood, calling him on X “one of the best historians on the American Revolution and creation of the republic.” And the body of work behind that affection was immense.
After studying under Bernard Bailyn at Harvard University, Wood published his first book in 1969, “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787,” based on his doctoral dissertation. It won the Bancroft Prize, establishing him as a rising star in the field. In 1993, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” won the Pulitzer Prize for History, while “Empire of Liberty,” his sweeping volume in the Oxford History of the United States, was a Pulitzer finalist in 2010.
Along the way came “The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin,” “Revolutionary Characters,” “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,” and many others. In 2010, he received the National Humanities Medal for “scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation.” Wood would even have a second-hand brush with Hollywood thanks to “Good Will Hunting,” when Matt Damon’s character name drops him to demolish a pretentious grad student in a bar. An impressive reference for a historian, even though the dialogue doesn’t accurately represent Wood’s work.
Yet for all this recognition, Wood was not without critics, and late in his career, they grew louder.
He found himself increasingly at odds with a younger, more progressive cohort of historians who came to view his work with suspicion. Where Wood saw the Revolution as a genuinely radical transformation that unleashed democratic and egalitarian forces, these critics dismissed such celebratory accounts as “Founders’ Chic” — a nostalgic approach that, in their telling, sanded down the negatives of the founding and lent itself too easily to a so-called patriotic mythology.
The friction sharpened in 2019, when Wood emerged as one of the most prominent scholarly critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project. In an open letter, debates, and numerous interviews, he objected to its claim that the American Revolution had been waged, in significant part, to protect slavery from a looming British threat. For Wood, this claim was not merely arguable but unsupported by the documentary record. To his detractors, Wood’s resistance confirmed that he had become a defender of an outdated and sanitized narrative. But to his admirers, it was the stand of a scholar unwilling to bend rigorous history to the demands of contemporary politics.
Nowhere is that divide more visible than in “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” which remains a fixture of college seminars precisely because it still provokes such fierce disagreement. Wood argued that the Revolution was not merely a political break from Britain but the most radical social upheaval in American history. A wholesale dismantling of monarchy, hierarchy, and patronage that set loose the democratic and egalitarian energies that define the nation still.
To show how completely the Revolution remade daily life, Wood looked past the battlefield to the small habits of a rank-bound world: who got to have a portrait painted, who was owed a title like “esquire,” who had to doff his cap or bow as a gentleman rode past. That whole apparatus of deference dissolved — so thoroughly that the leader of the new nation would be addressed not as “His Highness” but simply as “Mr. President” — and was eventually replaced by the once-radical premise that ordinary people were fit to govern themselves.
Some historians bristled at the thesis, arguing that a revolution that left women without the vote, Native peoples dispossessed, and the enslaved still in bondage hardly deserved to be called “radical” at all. But Wood turned the objection on its head: to dwell on what the War of Independence failed to finish, he insisted, was to miss what it had set in motion. By toppling monarchy and its logic of inherited and fixed superiority, the American Revolution “made possible the antislavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.”
The complaint has only sharpened in recent years, as a younger generation of historians came to see Wood’s celebratory account as the very thing the field needed to move past. Wood, for his part, had long understood how his book was received across the aisle. When then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich praised “Radicalism,” Wood joked on C-SPAN in 2002 that the endorsement had been “the kiss of death for me among a lot of academics, who are not right-wing Republicans.”
What critics often missed was that Wood was never a flatterer of the past. He knew the Founding’s failures intimately but refused to let them become the whole story. His was not the reflexive patriotism that turns away from hard facts, but the harder kind that looks straight at them and still finds something extraordinary in what a handful of provincial colonists managed to build. Ever wary of presentist agendas that lambaste the past for failing to meet our standards, Wood answered such criticism with a reminder in the New York Review of Books: “If history teaches anything, it teaches humility.” Americans, he believed, were not born believing themselves free and equal but came to believe it, slowly and unevenly, because the Revolution gave them both the ideals to measure themselves against and the language to do so.
As Wood explained to the Library of America, “The Revolution is the most important event in our history. It not only legally created the United States, but it infused into our culture our noblest ideals and highest aspirations, our beliefs in liberty, equality, and the happiness of ordinary people. Since there is no American ethnicity, these ideals and values are the only thing holding us together as a nation.”
There is a certain poetry in the timing of his death. We remember how the Founding bends toward the calendar, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both dying on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration. But we forget James Madison, who slipped away on June 28, 1836, six days short of the 60th. Similarly, Wood, who spent his life interpreting figures like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, has died on the threshold of America’s 250th anniversary, denied by weeks the celebration he taught Americans to study and appreciate. But when Americans gather to mark it, they will be reading him still, and few have done more to explain what there is to celebrate.
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Daniel N. Gullotta is an assistant professor at the Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society.
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