Gordon S. Wood, Pioneering Historian of Early America, Dies at 92
Source: New York Times
Gordon S. Wood, Pioneering Historian of Early America, Dies at 92
In a Pulitzer-winning book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” he wrote that the colonists rose up against an entire worldview, not just against taxation.
Gordon S. Wood was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2011. He worked to deepen understanding of the forces and events that led to the birth of the United States. Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis, via Getty Images
By David Stout
https://www.nytimes.com/by/david-stout
June 8, 2026
Gordon S. Wood, a historian 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 on Sunday in Providence, R.I. He was 92. ... His daughter, Amy Wood, said he died at a hospital after being struck by a motorist in East Providence.
A professor emeritus of history at Brown University, where he had taught since 1969, Professor Wood has been described by fellow historians as doing as much as anyone to deepen understanding and change perceptions of the forces and events that led to the birth of the United States.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” published in 1992, he wrote 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.
Professor Wood argued that, ironically, the colonists wanted to cut ties with Britain not because they were so different from the English but, in part, because they were so much like them.
In “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” Professor Wood wrote that the colonists were rising up against an age-old worldview in which common people were forever divided from those of noble birth.
Vintage
“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,” Professor Wood wrote. “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.”
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/books/gordon-s-wood-dead.html
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