Gordon S. Wood (Kenneth C. Zirkel / CC BY-SA 3.0)

It is with deep sadness that we learn of the death of historian Gordon S. Wood at the age of 92. Wood was a longtime friend and advisor to the Library of America who generously shared his incomparable expertise and shepherded five volumes to print, including the landmark two-volume collection The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776.

His partnership with LOA extended into this 250th anniversary year, with the contribution of a foreword to Ted Widmer’s forthcoming book The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text.

“To be an American is not to be someone,” he wrote, “but to believe in something.” No historian has done more to help us understand that “something” than Gordon Wood. He will be profoundly missed.

To commemorate Wood’s life and legacy, Library of America reached out to some of his fellow historians. Their responses appear below, in the order in which we received them.

Alan Taylor • Robert A. Gross • Ted Widmer • Richard D. Brown • Rosemarie Zagarri • Andrew Delbanco • Jack N. Rakove • Robert J. Allison

Alan Taylor
As a young graduate student fifty years ago, I encountered Gordon’s scholarship with great excitement at the depth of his reading in the sources and the incisive clarity of his arguments. His work had an enduring impact on my development as a scholar. Although we later disagreed on interpretations as we reviewed one another’s books, it was never personal. I only met him in person perhaps a dozen times, primarily at workshops and conferences, but I always enjoyed his company and came away with new insights and leads. I am saddened that we won’t again cross paths.

Robert A. Gross
What made Gordon Wood’s achievements as a historian of the American Revolution and the making of the American republic so significant? He didn’t write a self-congratulatory account of how the colonists rightly opposed British policies and were pushed by an unresponsive King and Parliament into rebellion. He didn’t assume that the US fulfilled a preordained destiny as a constitutional republic. Nor did he reduce the contest to an internal struggle in which Patriots of different social classes fought each other for power even as they waged war for independence, as the Progressives and neo-Progressives had done. Gordon knew that ideas were key to envisioning a new society and polity and as constituents of ideology. If groups clashed over different interests, he asked, what was the political culture through which they carried on conflicts? His writings were so powerful because he grappled with the drama, the tensions and uncertainties, and the world-changing breakthroughs and discoveries unexpectedly cast up in an age of revolution.

Gordon Wood was thoughtful and learned, and he was also modest and generous. We met back in December 1969, when I was a reporter for Newsweek covering the annual meeting of the American Historical Association and Gordon was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, whom I interviewed along with his colleagues. As it turned out, our paths crossed many times over the decades, the last time when we did a video together about Lexington and Concord for the Federalist Society. If you look at that film, you can see how alive Gordon was to the play of ideas, to the unexpected insight or underappreciated detail. His intellectual curiosity and personal warmth are evident every time he is on camera. He treated colleagues and friends with the same openness and respect as he gave to people, the famous and the little-known, in the past.

Ted Widmer
In the wake of the terrible news, many historians have been commenting on the immense legacy of Gordon Wood, often stating that his books led them to begin the serious study of history, well before they had the pleasure of meeting this most gracious representative of the historical profession.

In my case, the sequence was reversed. I was fortunate to know him first, many decades ago, and then to encounter his books later. I was lucky to grow up in a family that cared deeply about history, with a father who taught Chinese history, in the same university (Brown) where Gordon was a professor. When I was a stripling of fifteen, in the spring of 1978, my dad urged me to cross-register from my high school to Brown, so that I could take a course with Gordon, on American Colonial History. To call that course a revelation is not strong enough. It transformed my life and set me on a path toward American history, forever.

Which is not to say that I was an accomplished student. I was so young that I tried to write down every word that he said in his lectures, in real time, before realizing that it was impossible to write that fast. But over the course of the semester, I began to figure out how to listen better, and perhaps write better (that remains a work in progress). He was always there, in his office hours, to help.

He wasn’t famous yet; he was a tenured professor at Brown, with a well-regarded first book, but he had not yet written The Radicalism of the American Revolution, the 1991 book that won the Pulitzer and elevated him to a higher level. But Gordon being Gordon, the prize didn’t change him a whit. He was endlessly accessible, always interested in what his former students were up to. I sometimes thought that his service in the Air Force had something to do with his profoundly democratic outlook; he studied democracy, but he also lived it out, treating everyone the same. I can’t think of another historian who served in the armed forces.

When I became a White House speechwriter, he was slightly interested, but not very—the work of history always took precedent. Years later, I came to Brown for six years, and it was a chance to renew and deepen our friendship, already decades old. I was privileged to speak during the awarding of several honors for Gordon, including the John Carter Brown Medal, and the John F. Kennedy Medal at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Also, we had a festschrift for Gordon, with his former students and colleagues, and made a lighthearted poster, with some 1960s imagery. We called it “Gordon Wood (Stock).”

We were collaborating again in the last few years. Thanks to the Library of America, and Brian McCarthy (who worked with Gordon on the seminal edition, The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate), we were well on our way toward the publication of a volume about the Declaration of Independence (The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text). Gordon wrote an eloquent foreword, and it was, of course, perfect. We were all going to celebrate with a lunch in Providence the week after next. It feels terribly wrong to discuss the book without him in the room, to correct my mistakes, as he has been doing with grace for as long as I can remember.

But to talk honestly and searchingly about the Founders, based on exquisite fidelity to the sources, as the Library of America makes possible; he would like that. Not to be ideological, but to understand them on their own terms, through their writings. I can’t think of a better way to honor the nation’s 250th than to re-read the Founders, and in so doing, to uphold the high standards of this great scholar of the American Revolution. He was an Argonaut, as Jefferson phrased it, in a late letter to Adams, and his lifelong journey brought light to all of us.

Richard D. Brown
Gordon was a great scholar, an honest, unpretentious person, and a true friend. His brilliance was manifest.

Rosemarie Zagarri
Gordon Wood profoundly shaped my intellectual development as a historian. I read “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution” as a first-year undergraduate at Northwestern University. This article totally changed the way I understood the Revolution and opened up new ways of thinking about history. I read The Creation of the American Republic as a graduate student at Yale. It became my Bible and set me on a path to write my dissertation and first book, The Politics of Size: Political Representation in the United States, 1776–1850. I am a proud student of Tim Breen at Northwestern and Edmund S. Morgan at Yale. But in many ways, Gordon Wood’s work has had the most impact on me as a historian. I am forever grateful to have known him, in person and through his scholarship.

Andrew Delbanco
Gordon Wood had many grateful students, some lucky enough to learn from him in his classroom and others who learned from his transformative books. For me, as one of the latter, his most enduring lesson was the imperative to try to think oneself into the experience of people who lived in another world, namely the past. By no means an antiquarian or nostalgist, he nevertheless had little patience with writing about the past that is driven mainly by preoccupation with the present. He was clear-eyed about America’s crimes and follies yet proud of its best traditions. He had, in other words, the indispensable asset of a true scholar: an inquiring and subtle mind.

Jack N. Rakove
It’s a story I have often told. A week or two into my first graduate school seminar in 1969, Professor Bernard Bailyn told me to mosey up to the Harvard University archives in Widener Library to take a look at Gordon Wood’s doctoral dissertation, which Wood had completed five years earlier. The published version of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, appeared some weeks later. When I started working on my own dissertation two years later, that book became and remained fundamental to much of the work I have done ever since, for two reasons. First, Creation has no equal in tracing the complex development of critical political ideas in the decade separating the writing of the first state constitutions in the mid-1770s from the adoption of the Federal Constitution in the late 1780s. Second, because Gordon’s work was so much about the movement of ideas, while my own approach tended to focus on the taking of decisions, wrestling with his arguments helped me to sharpen and clarify my own. Perhaps this intellectual relationship curiously resembled the great friendship between Jefferson and Madison: two figures who agreed on almost everything but often reasoned in their own distinctive ways and voices.

Gordon and I were together only three days before the terrible accident that took his life. Along with Akhil Amar, we presented a concluding panel on The Legacy of Independence at the Second Judicial Circuit conference at Lake George, NY. To say I will deeply miss his intellectual vitality and generous friendship would be a great understatement.

Robert J. Allison
One morning in the mid-1990s I was part of a teacher workshop at the John Adams National Historic Site in Quincy. They had asked me to talk about the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, for a morning session. I don’t think I realized that their afternoon speaker was Gordon Wood—had I known he was on the agenda, I might have asked why they needed me. But he was due after lunch, so there was little chance our paths would cross.

Gordon Wood, whom I had never met, was the premier authority on the formation of state constitutions, both in his extraordinary Creation of the American Republic and in other essays which I had read. I had also read his many essays on the state of the profession, published not in the professional journals but in The New York Review of Books and other places where thinking adults could engage with serious ideas.

As I was in the middle of my talk to the teachers on the Massachusetts Constitution, the door at the back opened, and in came Gordon Wood. He found a seat in the back row, and sat quietly listening, his face unreadable save for the seriousness of his gaze. It was the most unnerving event in my academic career.

Did we exchange words at the time? I cannot remember.

What I do remember is the following week, a hand-written note arrived at my office. “Dear Professor Allison, I very much enjoyed your stimulating talk on the Massachusetts Constitution.”

From the most unnerving moment of my career, to one of the most treasured. Gordon Wood called me, a junior scholar at a Boston commuter school, “Professor Allison,” and said he liked my talk!

Since then, I had the good fortune to spend more time learning from Gordon Wood, both about the writing of history—from reading his books and essays—and about how to engage with other scholars. I was tasked with organizing the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’ Graduate Student Forum, which brings together graduate students doing early American history from around the country for a day of discussion with one another and our members. Gordon, a Colonial Society Member since 1966, moderated the 2007 forum, and returned in subsequent years to hear from graduate students.

Revolution 250, a consortium of history groups focused on the Revolution, launched a podcast in 2020, as a way to connect scholars, re-enactors, museum professionals, and an interested public in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of independence. For our first episode we wanted someone with gravitas and credibility, and Gordon instantly agreed to be our first guest, talking about Constitutions and Constitutionalism. We had no idea how many subsequent weekly episodes there would be, but two years later Gordon came back for our 100th episode, talking about Benjamin Franklin. Two years after that he came back for our 200th episode, to talk about Creation of the American Republic. Just a few weeks ago he joined us for our 300th, to talk about whether America is a “creedal nation.” He always had something new to say,

How tragic that after 92 full years—70 years of marriage to his wife Louise—his life was cut short. What an example he leaves behind. Yes, his scholarship will live on, though of course, as he knew, challenged by others, just as it challenged the work of previous generations. Those who study the Revolution and early Republic will continue to learn from him. Those of us who knew him will emulate his example of the engaged scholar. He was always seriously engaged with the ideas of the people he studied, as well as the ideas of his professional contemporaries, and to those interested in this intellectual journey he offered counsel, encouragement, and the real respect shown by serious criticism.