the american revolution by gordon s wood

In fact, he wanted to pursue a career in the Foreign Service.

Wood didn’t know that he would become a historian as an undergraduate. As he writes in Radicalism, it “made possible the antislavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.” It “destroyed aristocracy,” inaugurated “an entirely new kind of popular politics,” and “made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people-their pursuit of happiness-the goal of society and government.” His themes are guided partly by the idea that the Revolution was “the most radical and far-reaching event in American history.” The Revolution achieved numerous things.

Wood’s scholarship has profoundly influenced colleagues in his field and attracted a larger audience, who want to read serious studies of the Revolutionary era that move beyond the standard, often hagiographic biographies of the Founding Fathers. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University, Wood “read and reread nearly every pamphlet, sermon and tract concerned with politics that was written in the Revolutionary era” while researching The Creation. His scholarship, from the Bancroft-winning The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, which appeared in 1969, to his 2009 Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, provides readers with a sweeping panorama of early America. His writing fuses social, intellectual, and political history seamlessly together, and his books are exquisitely written, armed with the power of the best historical narratives. His scholarship is distinguished by its grasp of the monographs about the Founding era as well as his extensive use of primary documents. Wood has devoted his career to incorporating the shifting ideas and social and political developments defining the early American Republic into a convincing and riveting whole. In his Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood wrote, “There is a time for understanding the particular, and there is a time for understanding the whole.” This sentence is a window onto why Wood’s scholarship has had such an impact on scholars and nonspecialists alike.

The american revolution by gordon s wood