Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood dead at 92 after being struck and killed by car
NEW YORK — Gordon S.Wood, the eminent and prolific scholar who forged a highly influential and sharply debated narrative of the country’s early years of independence through such prize-winning works as “The Creation of the American Republic” and “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” has died.
He was 92.Wood, a professor emeritus at Brown University, died Sunday after being struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot in East Providence, Rhode Island, according to police.Author of dozens of books and essays, Wood never gained the mass audience of historians like David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin, but his findings became standard references for discussions about the formation of the US and the legacy of the revolution.Many peers regarded the white-haired, mild-looking Wood as the embodiment of the learned, traditional historian, guided by facts rather than ideology.In 2011, President Barack Obama presented him a National Humanities Medal “for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the US Constitution.”In recent years, younger academics increasingly alleged that Wood was too well-established, the epitome of the old-school historian who minimized the lives of slaves, women and Indigenous people.
John L.Brooke, a history professor at Ohio State University, would fault him for “a distinct avoidance of interpretative paradox and complexity,” even as he cited Wood’s “scale and scholarly enterprise.”His success was immediate and lasting.
His first book, “The Creation of the American Republic,” won the Bancroft Prize in 1970 and lived on with generations of students who embraced and contended with Wood’s findings that the Constitution was unintentionally subversive, a document devised by elites that led to “the destruction of the very social world they had sought to maintain.”His “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” won the Pulitzer in 1993 and the epic “Emp...