Historian Gordon S. Wood, "whose decades of research and writing established him as one of the country's pre-eminent scholars of the American Revolution, the personalities of the founding fathers, and the early years of the new republic," died June 7, the New York Times reported. He was 92.
A professor emeritus of history at Brown University, Wood wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), 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," the Times noted.
"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 observed. "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." He asserted that the colonists "were more English than the English themselves."
In a 2011 review of Wood's essay collection The Idea of America, David Hackett Fischer observed: "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."
Wood wrote about a dozen books, including The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), which was nominated for a National Book Award, and Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, a Pulitzer finalist in 2010. He was also presented with a National Humanities Medal 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 student's academic pretensions. Soon, Will says, 'you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization,' " the Times wrote.
Wood later told the Los Angeles Review of Books: "That's my two seconds of fame. More kids know about that than any of the books I have written."
A new collection of Wood's essays will be published next year. His most recent book was Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (2021).