Gordon Wood, a revered and beloved professor emeritus of history known for his preeminent scholarship on the American Revolution, died on June 7 at 92 years old.
Wood, born in Concord, Massachusetts, is survived by his wife Louise Goss, their three children — Amy, Christopher and Elizabeth Wood — five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in history from Tufts University in 1955, Wood served in the U.S. Air Force in Japan for three years. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1964, where he studied under Bernard Bailyn, a renowned scholar of the Revolutionary War period. Before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969, Wood taught at Harvard, the College of William and Mary and the University of Michigan.
“My family is extremely grateful for the role that Brown played in my father’s life,” Amy Wood, who is a history professor at Illinois State University, wrote in an email to The Herald. “He enjoyed teaching and mentoring students, both undergraduate and graduate, respected his colleagues, many of whom became life-long friends and was honored to have built his career there.”
As a scholar, Wood earned countless accolades including a National Humanities Medal, which Former President Barack Obama awarded him in 2011.
In the months following his passing, The Herald spoke with several of Wood’s colleagues, friends and former students, who remember his humility, kindness and brilliance. Wood left behind an enduring legacy of scholarship. But beyond that, he will be remembered for inspiring a generation of historians to pursue careers in academia.
Monumental scholarship
Wood has published many influential works including his first book, “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787” — which won the Bancroft Prize — and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.”
Published in 1969, “The Creation of the American Republic” examined the formation of American constitutional ideas and explored how the revolutionaries came to embrace a federal system that radically differed from the system they experienced under British rule.
Courtesy of Hans Eicholz
Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and History Professor Karin Wulf remembers being “gripped” by the book when she read it as an undergraduate student.
“It just gave you a sense of the power of ideas, and not just the power of ideas that shaped the early United States, but that ideas can be put into action in a way that will change the world,” Wulf said. The book influenced her to major in history and eventually become a historian, she added.
“Gordon’s first book was just a breakthrough book in the writing of American constitutional history,” said Jack Rakove, a professor emeritus of history and American studies and political science at Stanford University, who is currently editing a collection of Wood’s essays.
Whereas Rakove believes previous scholars wrote about this history in a “dry, institutional, rather prosaic way,” Wood “captured the excitement and the experimental nature, the kind of relentless momentum of American constitution making.”
“Historians claim to know everything, and in 1969, Gordon Wood pretty much knew what could be known, and we were collectively impressed by that,” said Peter Onuf, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia. “Wood’s work both served as a punctuation point for colonial history (and) a starting point for the American national narrative.”
Wood’s book “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” was also a definitive work in the field of history, said Richard Brown, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Connecticut.
Instead of framing the American Revolution from the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 to the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, Wood reperiodized the scope of this history from the mid-1700s through the 1820s or 30s, Brown noted.
But Wood’s influence was not limited to academics. “Some of his greatest fans to this day are people in the legal community,” Onuf said.
James Pfander, a professor of law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law wrote in an email to The Herald that he has “long treasured” Wood’s work and found it “very useful” on his path to becoming a legal scholar.
A supportive mentor and friend
When Johann Neem ’96, a history professor at Western Washington University took Wood’s course on the early republic during his senior year at Brown, it changed his life.
“His lectures were beautifully crafted,” Neem said.
Initially, Neem thought he would move to Washington D.C. and pursue a career in education policy. But after taking the course, Neem changed his post-graduation plans, deciding to go to graduate school in history and turning to Wood for a recommendation for his application.
Even after Neem graduated from Brown, Wood continued to support him as a scholar — he wrote a New York Review of Books piece on an article about Thomas Jefferson that Neem wrote early in his career.
Brendan McConville PhD’92, a history professor at Boston University, has known Wood since 1986 when Wood was his dissertation advisor.
“He really influenced how I approached certain types of historical problems,” McConville said. As a historian, Wood always approached historical questions with an “emphasis (on) change over time, and that’s something I’ve carried with me throughout my career,” McConville explained.
Like Neem, Wood remained “helpful” to McConville throughout his career as a historian, always writing letters of recommendation on his behalf.
Wood was also supportive of people outside of academia interested in the American Revolution, McConville said. McConville recalled an encounter with a student at Boston University whose high school classmate had written to Wood on “a whim” after watching a video he was featuring in. The student told McConville that Wood actually wrote back to the class, offering resources to learn more about the American Revolution.
“The class was so taken aback by the fact that this famous person had written to them,” McConville said. “That’s Gordon Wood as an educator.”
As a Yale graduate, Joseph Ellis, a professor emeritus of history at Mount Holyoke College, said he was never meant to become close friends with Wood, who attended Harvard.
Harvard and Yale graduates “tended to think of each other as different sides of the order, and so it started that way with Gordon, but he broke through,” Ellis said. Wood became a champion of Ellis’ work after he wrote a review of Ellis’ Pulitzer-winning “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.”
“He sent it off by saying, in the New York Review of Books, ‘Joe Ellis is now the leading historian of the American founding,’” Ellis added.
A humble giant
Despite the fact that Wood was catapulted to academic stardom — and pop-culture fame when he was referenced in the critically-acclaimed film “Good Will Hunting” — his friends recalled that he stayed humble and kept many of his accomplishments private.
“When George H. W. Bush was president, Gordon was quietly invited to the White House to give lectures to the president on George Washington and other founders,” former JCB Director Norman Fiering, who met Wood when they were both research fellows, wrote in a memorial speech sent to The Herald. Even with all the accolades, “he never lost the fundamental virtue of humility, never tooted his own horn,” Fiering noted.
“He was a bit daunting as a presence,” Neem said. “I got to know him later, and he’s very warm and he’s very humble.”
Neem said that, as an immigrant, he particularly admired Wood’s working-class background, which Neem believes shaped Wood’s understanding of the American experiment.
“He really believed that the United States was a distinctive place because of its commitment to equality,” Neem said. “As a lot of scholars in the field lost faith in the American experiment, he kept the faith, and I admire that.”
“It’s a huge loss. It marks the end of an era of scholarship on the revolution,” McConville said. “That’s how important he was.”
Ivy Huang is a University News and Science & Research editor from New York City. Concentrating in English, she has a passion for literature and American history. Her favorite authors include Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Toni Morrison. Outside of writing, she enjoys playing basketball, watching documentaries, and beating her high score on Subway Surfers.
