Gordon S. Wood
Gordon Stewart Wood (born November 27, 1933) is an American historian and professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" (1992). His book "The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787" (1969) won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. Early life and education. Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He graduated "summa cum laude" and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University in 1955 and has served as a trustee there . After serving in the United States Air Force in Japan, during which time he earned an A.M. at Harvard University, he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard, where he studied under Bernard Bailyn, receiving his Ph.D. in 1964. Career. Wood has taught at Harvard University, the College of William and Mary, the University of Michigan, Brown University, and in 1982–83 was Pitt Professor at Cambridge University. In addition to his books (listed below), Wood has written numerous influential articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966), "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the  Eighteenth Century" (1982), and "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution" (1987). He is a frequent contributor to "The New York Review of Books" and "The New Republic". A recent project was the third volume of the "Oxford History of the United States" – "Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815" (2009) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Contributing to the anthology "Our American Story" (2019), Wood addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative. He focused on the idea of equality as "the most radical and most powerful ideological force" that the American Revolution unleashed . "This powerful sense of equality is still alive and well in America, and despite all of its disturbing and unsettling consequences, it is what makes us one people." Wood was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988 and the American Philosophical Society in 1994. In popular culture. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich publicly and effusively praised Wood's "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" (1992). Wood, who met Gingrich once in 1994, surmised that Gingrich may have approved because the book "had a kind of Toquevillian touch to it, I guess, maybe  suggesting American exceptionalism, that he liked". He jokingly described Gingrich's praise in an interview on C-SPAN in 2002 as "the kiss of death for me among a lot of academics, who are not right-wing Republicans." Wood was mentioned in the 1997 film "Good Will Hunting." In one scene, Matt Damon's character mentions Gordon Wood while standing up to a Harvard student who is ridiculing Ben Affleck's character at a bar. He accuses the Harvard student of shallowly reiterating ideas he has encountered in his coursework, telling him that soon he would be "regurgitating Gordon Wood , talking about [...] the pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization." Wood said of the scene, "That’s my two seconds of fame! More kids know about that than any of the books I have written." This scene was later parodied by the television show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", in which the character Charlie Kelly attempts to "pull a Good Will Hunting" and asks "does no one know who Gordon Wood is?" Personal life. Wood married the former Louise Goss on April 30, 1956. They have three children: Christopher, Elizabeth and Amy. Their son, Christopher  Wood, is a professor of German at New York University and their daughter, Amy, is a professor of history at Illinois State University, and Elizabeth is an administrator at Milton Academy.