We Lost a Giant: In Tribute to Gordon S. Wood (1933–2026)

Gordon S. Wood — Pulitzer Prize winner, Bancroft Prize winner, Brown University professor emeritus, and by wide consensus the preeminent historian of the American founding for the last half-century — died Sunday, June 7, 2026. He was struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot in East Providence, Rhode Island. He died later that day at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.

That’s heartbreaking.

Here was a man who spent six decades illuminating the birth of this republic — the most successful revolution in the history of the world — and he is taken from us just weeks before America’s 250th birthday. He will not be with us to see it, and that is a profound loss for anyone who cares about the founding.

The Most Successful Revolution in World History

There is something worth remembering as we approach July 4th, 2026 and America’s 250th anniversary.

The American Revolution was not just a tax protest. It was not a minor political reshuffling. It was the most successful revolution in the history of the world.

The French Revolution failed. Rivers of blood, the guillotine, Napoleon — chaos. The Russian Revolution failed. Seventy years of communist tyranny and tens of millions dead. Almost every revolution in human history has failed. Almost every one. The American Revolution did not fail. And we should understand why.

Gordon Wood helps us understand why.

His masterwork, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1993, makes the case with remarkable clarity. This was not a conservative revolt to preserve the status quo. This was a genuine, sweeping transformation of society itself — not just of government, but of how human beings understood their relationship to one another and to power. Wood wrote:

“Such a change marked a real and radical revolution, a change of society, not just of government. People were to be ‘changed,’ said the South Carolina physician and historian David Ramsay, ‘from subjects to citizens,’ and ‘the difference is immense. Subject is derived from the latin words, sub and jacio, and means one who is under the power of another; but citizen is an unit of a mass of free people, who collectively, possess sovereignty. Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are so far equal, that none have hereditary rights superior to others. Each citizen of a free state contains, within himself, by nature and the constitution, as much of the common sovereignty as another.’”

Did you catch that? Subjects look up to a master. Citizens possess sovereignty. That is the American Revolution. That is what was at stake. That is what was won. And Gordon Wood spent his life making sure we understood it.

What He Filled In for Me

I want to be personal here for a moment, because that is what this piece deserves.

I grew up in American public schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now, I will give those schools their due — they were still teaching civics and American history. But it was cursory. Surface level. We got the dates, we got the names, we got the broad strokes. What we did not get was the depth, the texture, the why behind the founding.

Gordon Wood filled in those details for me, and I am genuinely grateful for that.

His account of the Federalists fighting against Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party was masterful. He helped me understand how this young, fragile country found its footing after Washington stepped down. Washington was irreplaceable — everyone knew it. And then suddenly you had Adams pulling in one direction and Jefferson pulling in another, and the republic had to survive that tension. It did survive it. But it was not inevitable, and that is a profound thing to understand about your country.

His three major works each opened a different window onto the founding:

• The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Bancroft Prize, 1970) — showed that the political theory of the Revolution was “unintentionally subversive,” unleashing forces the framers could not entirely control, and that the Constitution itself was a hard-won response to the instability of the Articles of Confederation

• The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Pulitzer Prize, 1993) — made the case that the Revolution transformed social relations, not just political institutions, eroding deference, patronage, and fixed social ranks

• Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 — my personal favorite of his works, a sweeping account of how the early republic wrestled with the contradiction between its founding ideals and the realities of expansion, markets, and slavery

If you read only one, start with Empire of Liberty. It is where Wood’s thinking is most fully realized, and it is the book I would recommend to anyone wanting to honor his memory with serious reading.

In that volume, Wood captures what the founders understood about self-governance — that it demanded something from citizens, not just from leaders. As Wood wrote:

“In a republic that depended on the intelligence and virtue of all citizens, the diffusion of knowledge had to be widespread. Indeed, said Noah Webster, education had to be ‘the most important business in civil society.’”

Noah Webster. The most important business in civil society. Not commerce. Not military power. Education. The cultivation of virtuous, informed citizens. That is what the founders believed. That is what Gordon Wood recovered for us and placed back in our hands.

Does that sound familiar? It should. It is the mission of the MOJO Academy.

A Word About Howard Zinn

I cannot write about Gordon Wood without saying something plainly.

For decades, too many of our students were not reading Gordon Wood. They were reading Howard Zinn. Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States — a Marxist rewriting of American history that serious historians across the ideological spectrum have dismantled — became standard fare in far too many classrooms. It is rubbish, and no serious person should entertain it as scholarship.

Thank God we had an antidote in Gordon Wood, and thank God his work will continue to serve as one. Not because he whitewashed anything — he did not. He was honest about slavery, honest about the contradictions of the founding, honest about the gap between the ideals proclaimed in Philadelphia and the realities on the ground. But he never let those contradictions become the whole story. He understood that ideas matter, that the Revolution’s radical insistence on human equality and citizenship planted seeds that would eventually, agonizingly, bear fruit. Howard Zinn wanted to burn the tree down. Gordon Wood wanted you to understand how it grew.

What the Founders Would Say

I have to believe — I genuinely believe — that Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton would look at Gordon Wood’s body of work and say: he got it right. He wrote well of our era. He captured it correctly.

That is no small tribute for any historian to earn.

For at least two generations of scholars and readers, you were either building on Wood or arguing with Wood — but you were always in dialogue with him. Akhil Reed Amar called him America’s greatest living historian of the founding era. That was not hyperbole. That was the simple truth.

He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2011. He edited major Library of America volumes on the Revolution. He was still publishing and speaking right up until his final days — engaged with the very semiquincentennial he would not live to see.

Ninety-two years old, still at his post. There is something deeply honorable about that.

What To Do Now

In tribute to Gordon S. Wood, I ask you to do one thing: read his books.

Start with Empire of Liberty. Then work through The Radicalism of the American Revolution and The Creation of the American Republic over the next twelve months. You will emerge a more informed, more grateful, more grounded American citizen.

The founders believed education was the most important business in civil society. Gordon Wood believed it too — he proved it with every page he ever wrote. His books remain, and they are waiting for you.

May Gordon Wood rest in peace! Gordon Wood was 92.