Tribute to Gordon Wood
It was an ordinary afternoon when I decided to do something few teenagers probably do. I picked up a copy of Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution and resolved to read a chapter every day until I finished it.
The introduction made a striking claim: “It was the Revolution, more than any other single event, that made America into the single most liberal, democratic, and modern nation in the world.” It was in that same book where Wood wrote that “The Revolution was the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history,” transforming a monarchical society into a nation free and unlike any other.
It is an academic book, to be sure. But it is also a book of uncommon value, tracing the foundations on which the American political tradition rests.
Reading Radicalism was an education in itself—a decision I do not regret and a book I encourage every American to read.
Gordon Wood was a titan of an American—a man who dedicated his life to studying, understanding, and explaining, as best he could and for as many as he could, the great and peculiar thing that is the American experiment in self-government.
He died June 7, 2026, struck by a car in East Providence, Rhode Island. He was 92 years old and died less than one month before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The cruelty of that timing is not lost on those who loved his work.
Wood’s central argument across his famous works is worth stating plainly. The Revolution, he argued, was not an elitist or pro-slavery event but one that “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 “ma[de] the interests and prosperity of ordinary people—their pursuit of happiness—the goal of society and government.” Within decades of the Declaration, he wrote, “the United States became the most egalitarian nation in the history of the world.”
He pushed back on the claim that the Revolution occurred primarily to protect American slavery. His reasoning reflected his core conviction that the Revolution’s egalitarian ideals were genuinely transformative—shared across society from the bottom up, not merely cover for elite or racial interests.
“Gordon Wood focused on what he saw as the expanding political possibilities manifested in the ideas of the American Revolution and then the Federal Constitution,” Tara Nummedal, chair of the Department of History at Brown University, said. “He conceptualized the American experiment as one of enormous potential. He never lost his energy for sharing that vision of a past with enormous meaning for the present.”
That is perhaps the finest tribute one could offer a historian.
We would do well to remember Gordon Wood and heed what he spent a lifetime telling us—above all, that the Revolution released and intensified forces that helped create in America a society unlike any that had existed before, a place where democracy and equality were no longer things to be born or debated, but articles of faith to be fulfilled.
On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, they still are.