{"id":132328,"date":"2026-06-08T11:15:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T17:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/gordon-s-wood-eminent-scholar-of-the-american-revolution-dead-at-92\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T11:15:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T17:15:05","slug":"gordon-s-wood-eminent-scholar-of-the-american-revolution-dead-at-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/gordon-s-wood-eminent-scholar-of-the-american-revolution-dead-at-92\/","title":{"rendered":"Gordon S. Wood, eminent scholar of the American Revolution, dead at 92"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FILE
FILE – President Barack Obama presents a National Humanities Medal to author, historian and Brown University professor emeritus, Gordon Wood, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington on March 2, 2011. (AP Photo\/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)<\/span>(AP Photo\/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Gordon S. Wood, the eminent and prolific scholar who forged a highly influential and sharply debated narrative<\/a> of the country\u2019s early years of independence through such prize-winning works as \u201cThe Creation of the American Republic\u201d and \u201cThe Radicalism of the American Revolution,\u201d has died. He was 92.<\/p>\n

Wood, a professor emeritus at Brown University, died Sunday after being struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot in East Providence, Rhode Island, according to police.<\/p>\n

Author of dozens of books and essays, Wood never gained the mass audience of historians like David McCullough<\/a> and Doris Kearns Goodwin<\/a>, but his findings became standard references for discussions about the formation of the U.S.<\/a> and the legacy of the revolution. Many peers regarded the white-haired, mild-looking Wood as the embodiment of the learned, traditional historian, guided by facts rather than ideology.<\/p>\n

In 2011, President Barack Obama presented him a National Humanities Medal \u201cfor scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, younger academics increasingly alleged that Wood was too well-established, the epitome of the old-school historian who minimized the lives of slaves, women and Indigenous people. John L. Brooke, a history professor at Ohio State University, would fault him for \u201ca distinct avoidance of interpretative paradox and complexity,\u201d even as he cited Wood\u2019s \u201cscale and scholarly enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

His success was immediate and lasting. His first book, \u201cThe Creation of the American Republic,\u201d won the Bancroft Prize in 1970 and lived on with generations of students who embraced and contended with Wood\u2019s findings that the Constitution was unintentionally subversive, a document devised by elites that led to \u201cthe destruction of the very social world they had sought to maintain.\u201d<\/p>\n

His \u201cThe Radicalism of the American Revolution\u201d won the Pulitzer in 1993 and the epic \u201cEmpire of Liberty\u201d was a finalist in 2009.<\/p>\n

Wood did welcome scholarly breakthroughs, notably Annette Gordon-Reed\u2019s \u201cpersuasive contextual case\u201d that the enslaved Sally Hemings bore some of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s children. In \u201cEmpire of Liberty,\u201d which covered the years 1789 to 1815, he included lengthy passages on slavery and called it a cancer \u201ceating away at the message of liberty and equality.\u201d<\/p>\n

At other times, Wood angrily resisted new approaches. He was a prominent critic of The New York Times\u2019 Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 Project<\/a> and its contention \u2014 later amended \u2014 that maintaining slavery was a key motivation for the American Revolution. He alleged that the project encouraged a sense \u201cvictimhood\u201d and feeling \u201caggrieved,\u201d even as he acknowledged he hadn\u2019t read most of it. He would counter that the founders, even such plantation owners as Jefferson and James Madison<\/a>, believed \u2014 mistakenly \u2014 that slavery would die a natural death and the revolution itself energized the American abolitionist movement.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all want justice, but not at the expense of truth,\u201d he wrote in 2019, adding, in a widely disputed statement, \u201cI don\u2019t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wood was born into history: His hometown, Concord, Massachusetts, had been the residence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott, among others. But his passion for the subject he later mastered did not arise until college. Wood found his high school history education unbearable, suffering through classes in which the teacher simply read from a textbook.<\/p>\n

Wood did admire his Latin instructor, who encouraged him to attend Tufts University, from which he graduated summa cum laude. He received a master\u2019s and Ph. D. from Harvard University and studied under a celebrated Revolutionary War historian Bernard Bailyn, whose documentation of the intellectual forces behind independence in his landmark \u201cThe Ideological Origins of the American Revolution\u201d Wood would build upon in \u201cThe Creation of the American Republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his introduction to \u201cThe Idea of America,\u201d published in 2011, Wood looked back on his own work and the evolution of scholarship in his lifetime. He noted the many errors of the country\u2019s founders but warned against scolding historical figures because of mistakes which seem obvious now, what he and others call \u201cPresentism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe drama, indeed the tragedy of history, comes from our understanding of the tension that existed between the conscious wills and intentions of the participants in the past and the underlying conditions that constrained their actions and shaped their future,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the study of history teaches anything, it teaches us the limitations of life. It ought to produce prudence and humility.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press writer Michael Casey contributed to this report from Boston.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

– President Barack Obama presents a National Humanities Medal to author, historian and Brown University professor emeritus, Gordon Wood, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington on March 2, 2011. (AP Photo\/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)(AP Photo\/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File) NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Gordon S. Wood, the eminent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":132329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5734],"tags":[],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-132328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-associated-press"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132328"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=132328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}