In Memoriam, Gordon S. Wood

The following essay originally appeared in National Review on June 10, 2026.

The past six months have not been good to American historians. On Christmas Day, we lost the eminent Daniel Walker Howe, whose books were my nominees for accompaniment to a desert island. Six weeks later, we lost the pioneering Lincolnian, Gabor Boritt. And now, the list has been lengthened to include Gordon Wood, the victim of a parking-lot accident less than a month before the 250^th anniversary of the American Revolution he did so much to celebrate as the greatest event of modern world history.

The honors and plaudits he won are the Everests of American historical writing: the Bancroft Prize in 1970 for The Creation of the American Republic, the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (and nearly a second Pulitzer for Empire of Liberty in 2009) – even a line in the 1997 movie, Good Will Hunting. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Creation was one of the urtexts I was expected to admire and to master, especially for its description of how Americans developed their own domestic revolutionary ideology (and applied it through their Revolutionary state constitutions).1

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For my part, however, it was The Radicalism of the American Revolution which made a greater impression. Wood made me understand how thoroughly stuck in the antique ways of pre-modern European society Americans were on the eve of 1776, a world where slavery was treated with a shrug of the shoulders as just one more practice of servitude, and where commerce functioned within webs of patronage, not customers. The Revolution, Wood explained, constituted a sharp and decisive break with that world. Servitude disappears in America and slavery becomes an aberration that demands either bizarre excuses or unprecedented denunciation; gentleman is no longer a rank for those who do not work with their hands, but merely a description of polite behavior; honor shrinks as a symbol of importance, and business becomes dominated by the mobility and impersonality of banks and paper money.2 With a jolt, it becomes clear how, in the span of a single generation, Americans become the people that Tocqueville admired and who elected Lincoln as president.

Wood’s trademarks were his strict attention to written sources, and his relative indifference to social, cultural and ethnic history. But he balanced that indifference by his exquisite attention to the most minute changes in voice by pamphleteers and newspapers, even in the use of political vocabulary. When Creation was published in 1969, Wood was considered avant-garde because his revolutionaries seemed to pay no attention to the restrained and lofty political models of Greece and Rome. But he would remain just as resistant to the import of more recent ideological fashions into history writing, and especially the attempt to convert historical process into broad binary categories of oppressed/oppressor or settler/indigenous. In 2019, he broke with a large community of historians when he expressed his skepticism toward The 1619 Project’s proposal that slavery was the dominant fact of American life and that the Revolution was a device for protecting it. In Wood’s eyes, this was absurd. The 1619 Project might be pardoned as an example of over-wrought journalism, but it should not be mistaken for sober-sided history-writing, and it was important for the life of the nation for historians to say so. “We all want justice,” he wrote, “but not at the expense of truth.”3

Gordon Wood was born on the erupting-ground of the American Revolution in Concord, Massachusetts, and he carried with him the conviction that the Revolution made the United States into a nation unlike any other nation before it. Fully as much as he repudiated The 1619 Project, he also repudiated the more recent nonsense which insists that there is an American ‘heritage’ conferred by ancestry from the Mayflower or Valley Forge. “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” he wrote in one of his last essays. To the contrary, it was the Revolutionary state and its fiery and universalistic Declaration of Independence which made the American nation. “To be an American is not to be someone,” he wrote, “but to believe in something.”4

Gordon Wood understood that historians are the memory system of a democracy. Because the American democracy has been organized around a set of propositions which have political meaning, it is vital to understand where that political meaning came from, and that is the task of the historian. Otherwise, political meanings can be twisted into propaganda and a democratic experiment becomes threatened with collapse. The Declaration was a torch that illumined the world, and illumined my immigrant great-grandparents – a Jewish tailor from Bavaria, a wayward nobleman’s son from Sweden – in the 1880s. Gordon basked in the light of that torch and invited us to understand and share in it. RIP, Gordon Stewart Wood.