Gordon S Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who spent decades arguing the American Revolution was as much about internal transformation as kicking out the British, was killed on Sunday when a car struck him in a supermarket parking lot in East Providence, Rhode Island. He was 92.
According to East Providence police, as reported by the local outlet golocalprov.com, Wood was hit while crossing the parking lot. The driver stayed put and cooperated with authorities. Police said Wood was transported to Rhode Island Hospital with “serious injuries,” which ultimately proved fatal.
Wood won the Pulitzer in 1993 in the history category for The Radicalisation of the American Revolution, a landmark work advancing the theory that breaking with Britain involved a profound internal social and political shift, not just a desire to evict colonial overlords. He was the Alva O Way University Professor and professor of history emeritus at Brown University, and the local outlet called him “the leading Revolutionary era historian” for his “unmatched” list of academic awards over the last half century.
His other prominent books included The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969); Empire of Liberty, an account of the early United States; and Revolutionary Characters, a biography of the founding fathers. His awards included the 1970 Bancroft Prize and the National Humanities Medal, presented by Barack Obama at the White House in March 2011 for “scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the US constitution.”
According to a Washington Post obituary published Monday, Wood’s works “were considered benchmarks of intellectual and social historiography” that helped reshape America’s origin story after World War II. He was also a prominent critic of the New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project and its contention - later amended - that maintaining slavery was a key motivation for the American Revolution. He said the project encouraged a sense of “victimhood” and feeling “aggrieved,” while acknowledging he hadn’t read most of it. Another prominent critic was Donald Trump, who said in 2020 the project “warped” the American story.
Wood argued that the founders, including plantation owners Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, mistakenly believed slavery would die a natural death, and that the Revolution itself energized the abolitionist movement. Slavery in the US was not abolished until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December 1865, after the Civil War - a timeline that would benefit from a historian’s footnote.
Wood’s death was confirmed by his daughter, Amy Louise Wood, a historian at Illinois State University.