The celebrations of the 250th anniversary of independence will be a bit dimmer now with the sudden passing of the greatest historian of the American founding, Gordon S. Wood. Since the 1960s, Wood stood at the pinnacle of the historical profession. The list of awards and accolades he received over his sixty-year career, including the National Medal of the Humanities, is longer than most academics’ CVs. For all the deserved laurels, however, Wood accomplished something most academics only dream of: he crossed into popular culture. The outpouring of memorials that flooded X upon news of his passing, not just from historians but also from general readers, lawyers, and politicians, speaks to how Wood’s influence stretched far beyond the ivory tower. Such an outpouring would probably have embarrassed Wood.Everyone who met or knew him always spoke of his boyish bashfulness, generosity, and kindness. Considering his accomplishments, his humble personality was extraordinary.

　　As an historian, Wood’s methodology was characterized above all by the pursuit of truth through context and objectivity. Although he was not naive enough to believe anyone could attain the whole truth, he nevertheless considered it the historian’s mission to come as close to it as possible by placing context at the center of analysis and narrative alike. Historians “who cut loose from this faith do so at the peril of their discipline,” he once wrote. Though it may be cliché to say the past is a foreign country, he believed the cliché remained true. Historical moments and actors had to be understood within the worlds they inhabited and on their own terms. To do otherwise, Wood often argued, might produce something useful, even a “usable past,” but it was not history.

　　Wood’s commitment to context also demanded a commitment to objectivity. While perfect objectivity was unattainable, historians still had to strive for it by keeping their own thoughts and feelings out of their analysis. As he wrote in the introduction to his final book, Power and Liberty, any claim to objectivity was “immediately suspect.” Yet “without a commitment to objective truth and the pastness of the past, the history of a nation becomes distorted, turns into politics by other means, and ends up becoming out-and-out partisan propaganda.”

　　One final aspect of Wood’s method bears mentioning, in no small part because commentaries on his work often overlook it: the idea of history as tragedy. Wood believed the proper study of history revealed the thoughts, hopes, and intentions of individuals or groups and how contingency and causality often lead to outcomes far different from those desires. Having a tragic sense of history reveals the one and only law of history: nothing plays out the way people think it will. Thus, the proper study of history should teach humility and an appreciation of human limitations.

　　Wood first applied these laudable goals in his 1969 book The Creation of the American Republic. Winning the Bancroft Award, it represents a monumental achievement in historical scholarship and takes its rightful place as the most important book ever written on the Revolutionary Era. That it emerged from his dissertation, written under the direction of Bernard Bailyn, himself among the most important American historians ever, speaks to Wood’s immense talent and genius. The book’s impact proved immediate and long-term. It shaped multiple generations of historians, influenced the legal profession, offered new avenues for political theorists, and cemented Wood’s reputation. Published nearly 60 years ago, the book remains as important today as when it first rolled off Chapel Hill’s presses.

　　Sadly, the fight over the 1619 Project revealed more than anything else that Gordon Wood never stopped being a historian. Rather, historians stopped being like Gordon Wood.

　　In Creation, Wood argued that in the period 1776–87, Americans struggled with the political, social, and constitutional ramifications they had unleashed with the Revolution. Far from being the unified group that myth often portrays, Wood, in an exhaustive examination of primary sources, revealed deep fissures over a whole host of issues such as the nature of representation, the meaning of constitutions, the role of the people, the necessity of republican virtue, the worthy against the licentious, and even the political thought of John Adams. He showed how social conflict lurked beneath the surface and sometimes openly drove these constitutional and political conflicts. Against popular notions of an American constitutionalism as borne out of some calm, cool, and collected process of bewigged Philosopher-Kings, Creation revealed the realities of a messy, contentious, frustrating, and patchwork process of give-and-take. This led Wood to conclude that the Constitution of 1787 emerged primarily from its proponents desire to restrain popular excesses.

　　So important were Wood’s findings and conclusions that Creation became the starting point for any discussion of the American Revolution’s history. His emphasis on republican virtue launched a multi-decade effort by historians to recover the nature of republicanism and its relationship with Lockean liberalism. In no small part, Wood, alongside J. G. A. Pocock and, to a lesser extent, Bernard Bailyn, unknowingly launched what scholars called “the republican synthesis.” For the next three decades, and building off the work of Wood, Pocock, and Bailyn, scholars investigated the Roman, Renaissance, and English Whig roots of American republicanism. What started as a recovery of the American Revolutionary era’s reception and uses of the intellectual heritage of civic virtue, fears of corruption, and the tension between power and liberty became the dominant paradigm for understanding the period of 1765–1840. Although the republican synthesis eventually grew stale, the controversy around it from roughly 1970 to 2000 arguably produced the most important and critical works of history and political theory ever published.

　　In many ways, being labeled as one of the progenitors of the republican synthesis frustrated Wood—one could even say that he himself had fallen victim to historical tragedy. He believed that most scholars had missed the important dimensions of social conflict that underpinned much of Creation’s argument. There is a large degree of truth to this claim. Yet, in 1991, Wood reestablished his point on the social change ushered in by the Revolution with his other monumental work, Radicalism of the American Revolution.Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, Radicalism ranks as Wood’s most controversial work—although one suspects that Newt Gingrich did him no favors in academia by calling it his favorite historical work.

　　Unlike Creation, in which social change and conflict were present but not at the forefront, Radicalism of the American Revolution placed the social dimensions of the Revolution front and center. Wood argues that in the decades before the Revolution, colonial America maintained the vestiges of a monarchical society present in English and European society. This hierarchical society affected all social and political relationships from family structure to the politics of being ruled by one’s betters. The Revolution, with its emphasis on republican equality, merit, and individualism, fractured this structure. In its place came new republican social bonds and relationships built upon enlightenment ideas of compassion and republican notions of disinterestedness, personal independence, and a natural aristocracy. Yet, these beliefs, once unfettered from the old world of monarchy, proved too strong for republicanism. They eventually exploded into the nineteenth-century democratic world dominated by egalitarianism, commercialism, self-interest, and vulgar populism. This unforeseen outcome of the Revolution explains why most of the Revolution’s surviving leaders departed this world disillusioned and distraught over the future of the republic they helped create.

　　As much a work of synthesis as original research, the number of scholarly critics of Radicalism then and now is legion. Most of these criticisms, it must be noted, focus on details and elements they wish Wood had addressed rather than on the actual arguments he made. While it is true that Wood did not focus as much on “marginalized people” or religion as much he probably should have, and its focus on the North ignores the social forces of the South during this era, it seems that most who criticize Radicalism do so because of Wood’s belief that the American Revolution, even with its tragic sense, represented a positive event in human history rather than a mistake.

　　Wood continued to publish right up until his death, but his last work that captured the attention of the historical community, Empire of Liberty, came out in 2009. A part of the famed Oxford Series in American History, Wood’s Empire tackled the first decades under the Constitution.The work, in many ways, represented the capstone of his scholarly pursuits, as many of the themes found in Creation and Radicalism are not only found in Empire but receive the refinement and erudition that only a master historian can deliver. At the same time, it explored other constitutional issues that Wood had previously addressed only in scholarly journal articles. His discussion of the role of the federal judiciary in the early republic and, in particular, the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, might be the single best treatment ever done on the topic.

　　Except for Empire of Liberty, Wood shifted his focus away from purely academic work beginning in the early 2000s, writing instead for a wider, more general audience. His works from this period include an excellent biography of Benjamin Franklin, two wildly popular collections of his essays entitled Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different and The Idea of America, a beautifully written dual biography of the relationship between Adams and Jefferson published in 2017, and his aforementioned final book, 2023’s Power and Liberty. With a graceful style and an uncommon ability to explain complex historical events in understandable terms, he was not just one of the profession’s most important scholars but also one of the most important academic historians who could speak to both the academy and popular audiences.

　　I was not only in awe of Gordon Wood’s deep learning but also of how he truly was the beau ideal of a historian and a true gentleman.

　　Wood’s rise in the public consciousness did not emerge from his more popular works, however. Rather, its origins came in the 1997 Oscar-winning film, Good Will Hunting. In a famous scene in which Matt Damon’s character, Will Hunting, is attempting to rescue a female from the droning of a first-year history graduate student trying to show off his knowledge, Hunting cites Gordon Wood to embarrass the student who merely restated what he had read and rescue the young lady. While the scene propelled Wood into the public consciousness, he often made light of it, especially because Damon’s character not only mischaracterized Wood’s work but also offered an interpretation that he himself rejected. Still, Wood (however badly the film represented it) was now Hollywood-famous.

　　Good Will Hunting and Matt Damon notwithstanding, Wood’s popularity outside of the academy seems in no small part tied to his core belief in seeking truth, understanding the Founding on its own terms, and defending the Founding from presentist claims. In recent years, as Wood continued to deliver numerous talks about the nature of the Revolution, he began to express ever more strongly the unique nature of the Founding. Wood was an open and vigorous advocate of what has come to be called the “creedal nation.” To him, the radicalism of the Revolution and its breaking of the old world’s chains of blood and land made the United States different, even exceptional, from other nations. Rather than being tied to those old-world ideas, being an American meant accepting certain basic ideas of equality and individualism, and those ideas are rooted in our founding. Our perpetual desire to return to the Founding to provide meaning to today reflected our belief that we had to always first get right with the Founding. As he often quipped, England never says “What did William Pitt think” about a particular topic. Thus, the story of the United States, while plagued with the troubles and even evils that accompany human nature, remained the hope of the world. 

　　Yet, the winds of change in the historical profession were blowing fast, and not for the better. Since the publication of Radicalism, the historical profession has moved away from Wood’s belief in the desire to pursue truth out of context. Admittedly, those elements had been present for a long time, but their real influence in the historical profession began in the 1990s and only accelerated in the 2000s. Rather than pursuing truth and seeking to understand the past on its own terms, younger generations of scholars attacked that approach as a hoary relic of nineteenth-century scientism. They sought to dismantle it for the supposedly path-breaking innovation of social theory.

　　Despite the efforts of Wood and a small circle of others, in the historical profession, the centrality of context gave way to the Foucauldian deconstruction of hidden power structures, moral relativism, and presentism, and to the desire to make historical scholarship influential in contemporary political debates. Wood, with his desire for scholarly objectivity, his supposed exclusive focus on DWEMs (Dead White Elite Males), and his argument for the uniqueness and general positive beliefs about the goodness of the Revolution, became one of the ideologues’ primary targets.

　　All of this takes us to the 1619 Project. When its authors proclaimed that America began with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 and American history represented one continual story of oppression, patriarchy, and was a general calamity upon the world, Wood resisted. He criticized this pervasive desire to see the American Revolution as a movement designed to preserve slavery. Not only did he rightly attack the claim as lacking any evidentiary basis, but he also argued that it ignored mountains of evidence to the contrary. People can claim the Founders failed to uphold their beliefs, but they cannot assert that the Founders acted on beliefs they did not hold. Such presentist arguments ignore truth, context, and understanding the past on its own terms. Sadly, the fight over the 1619 Project revealed more than anything else that Gordon Wood never stopped being a historian. Rather, historians stopped being like Gordon Wood.

　　I would like to end this remembrance on a personal note. Like so many, I have long admired Wood’s work ever since I first read Creation as an undergraduate. My wife (who gifted me that undergraduate copy of Creation) and I had the pleasure of having dinner with him and my mentor, Lance Banning, while in graduate school. Just a few years later, with my career less than a year old, Wood cited my first published work in his Empire of Liberty. It remains a highlight of my career.

　　Our paths finally crossed again just a couple of years ago, this time at a series of Liberty Fund Conferences that he and another titan of early America, Jack P. Greene, hosted. At each meeting, I was not only in awe of his deep learning but also of how he truly was the beau ideal of a historian and a true gentleman. As we fast approach the semiquincentennial, it is heartbreaking to think that one scholar who did so much to defend and explain why that moment 250 years ago still matters will not see it. The one real solace is that as long as people take the Founding seriously, they will continue to read Gordon S. Wood.