Gordon S. Wood

For other people named Gordon Wood, see Gordon Wood (disambiguation).

Gordon Stewart Wood
Born	(1933-11-27) November 27, 1933 Concord, Massachusetts
Nationality	USA
Fields	History
Institutions	College of William and Mary Harvard University University of Michigan Brown University Cambridge University Northwestern University School of Law
Alma mater	Harvard University Tufts University
Doctoral advisor	Bernard Bailyn
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize (1993) Bancroft Prize (1970) National Humanities Medal (2010)

Gordon S. Wood (born November 27, 1933) is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University and the recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution. His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Biography

Youth and education

Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1955 and has served as a trustee there. After serving in the U.S. Air Force in Japan, during which time he earned an A.M. at Harvard University, he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard, where he studied under Bernard Bailyn.

Career

Wood received his Ph.D. in 1964. He has taught at Harvard, the College of William and Mary, the University of Michigan, Brown, Pitt Professor at Cambridge University, and in 1982–83 lectured for One Day University.

In addition to his books (listed below), Wood has written numerous influential articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966), "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth century" (1982), and "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution" (1987). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.

A recent project was the third volume of the Oxford History of the United States -- Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009) -- a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Marriage and family

Wood married the former Louise Goss, April 30, 1956. They have three children: Christopher, Elizabeth and Amy. Two went into history: their son, Christopher Wood, is a professor of art history at Yale University and their daughter, Amy Louise Wood, is a professor of history at Illinois State University.

Publications

• The Creation of the American Republic, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1969.
• (Editor) Representation in the American Revolution, University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA), 1969.
• (Editor) The Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820, George Braziller (New York, NY), 1971, revised edition, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1990.
• (Editor) The Confederation and the Constitution, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1973.
• Revolution and the Political Integration of the Enslaved and Disenfranchised, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (Washington, DC), 1974.
• (Contributor) Leadership in the American Revolution, Library of Congress (Washington, DC), 1974.
• (With J.R. Pole) Social Radicalism and the Idea of Equality in the American Revolution, University of St. Thomas (Houston, TX), 1976.
• (With others) The Great Republic, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1977, 4th edition, Heath (Lexington, MA), 1992.
• The Making of the Constitution, Baylor University Press (Waco, TX), 1987.
• (Editor) Rising Glory of America, 1760–1820, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1990.
• The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.
• (Editor, with Louise G. Wood) Russian-American Dialogue on the American Revolution, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1995.
• Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1998.
• (Editor, with Anthony Molho) Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1998.
• Monarchism and Republicanism in the Early United States, La Trobe University (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 2000.
• The American Revolution: A History, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2001.
• The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2004.
• Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2006.
• The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2008.
• Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2010.
• The Idea of America. Reflections on the Birth of the United States. Penguin Press, New York City, 2011.

• Book contributions
  • Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, edited by Peter Onuf and Jan Lewis, University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA), 1999
  • To the Best of My Ability: The American Presidency, edited by James M. McPherson, Society of American Historians (New York, NY), 2000.

• Contributor of articles to academic journals:
  • New England Quarterly
  • William and Mary Quarterly
  • American Historical Review
  • Virginia Quarterly Review
  • Washington and Lee Law Review
  • Virginia Law Review

• Contributor of book reviews to periodicals, including
  • New York Review of Books
  • The New York Times
  • The New Republic

In popular culture

The Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, publicly and effusively praised Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Some liberals in academia reacted negatively and Wood jokingly described Gingrich's praise in an interview on C-SPAN in 2002 as "the kiss of death."

In one of the celebrated scenes of the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon's eponymous autodidact gets into an argument with a student from Harvard University, whom he accuses of uncritically parroting the views of the authors on his reading list as a first-year graduate student. He goes on to predict that a little later in his curriculum, he would simply be "regurgitating Gordon Wood." The student begins to respond with a critique of Wood, which Hunting interrupts, completes, and notes is plagiarized from Daniel Vickers's Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County.

In the episode, "The Gang Reignites the Rivalry," of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Charlie, trying to emulate Good Will Hunting, accuses a group of students of regurgitating Gordon Wood.

External links

• "Gordon S. Wood", Faculty Webpage, Brown University
• Gordon S. Wood, "The Learning of Liberty for Civic Life", lectures at Boston University
• Gordon S. Wood at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Gordon S. Wood in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Booknotes interview with Wood on The American Revolution: A History, April 21, 2002.
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Wood, April 13, 2008
• In Depth interview with Wood, September 5, 2010