Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Gordon S. Wood has died at the age of 92 after he was hit by a car in Rhode Island.
Wood, a professor emeritus atBrown University, died Sunday after being struck by a vehicle in a supermarket parking lot, according to police in East Providence.
The eminent and prolific scholar forged a highly influential and sharply debated narrative of the country's early years of independence through prize-winning works such asThe Creation of the American RepublicandThe Radicalism of the American Revolution.
Author of dozens of books and essays, Wood never gained the mass audience of historians like David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin, but his findings became standard references for discussions about the formation of the U.S. and the legacy of the revolution. Many peers regarded the white-haired, mild-looking Wood as the embodiment of the learned, traditionalhistorian, guided by facts rather than ideology.
In 2011, PresidentBarack Obamapresented him a National Humanities Medal “for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.”
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 “a distinct avoidance of interpretative paradox and complexity,” even as he cited Wood’s “scale and scholarly enterprise.”
His success was immediate and lasting. His first book,The Creation of the American Republic, won the Bancroft Prize in 1970 and lived on with generations of students who embraced and contended with Wood's findings that the Constitution was unintentionally subversive, a document devised by elites that led to “the destruction of the very social world they had sought to maintain.”
HisThe Radicalism of the American Revolutionwon the Pulitzer in 1993 and the epicEmpire of Libertywas a finalist in 2009.
Wood's name also was familiar to moviegoers through the Academy Award-winningGood Will Hunting, released in 1997. The lead character, a pugnacious, self-taught genius played by Matt Damon, taunts a Harvard undergraduate: "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." (Ideas, Wood would point out, that he did not endorse).
A few years earlier, Wood received an unexpected and uncomfortable compliment from then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who listedThe Radicalism of the American Revolutionas an essential work of history. Wood would remember how the Georgia Republican's blessing was a "kiss ofdeath" among his many liberal peers and perceived as an affirmation of conservative policies.
Source: Drudge Report
