Nationality American Role University Professor | Name Gordon Wood Fields History Spouse Louise Goss (m. 1956) | |
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Institutions College of William and MaryHarvard UniversityUniversity of MichiganBrown UniversityCambridge UniversityNorthwestern University School of Law Alma mater Harvard UniversityTufts University Children Christopher Wood, Elizabeth Wood, Amy Louise Wood Books The Radicalism of the Am, The American Revolutio, Empire of Liberty: A History of, The Creation of the Ameri, Revolutionary characters Similar People Bernard Bailyn, Jack P Greene, Thomas Paine |
Gordon s wood 2010 national book festival
Gordon Stewart Wood (born November 27, 1933 in Concord, Massachusetts) is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University, and the 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.
Contents
- Gordon s wood 2010 national book festival
- Mhs presents kennedy medal to gordon s wood
- Youth and education
- Career
- Marriage and family
- In popular culture
- Publications
- References

Mhs presents kennedy medal to gordon s wood
Youth and education

Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1955 and has served as a trustee there. After serving in the U.S. 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, the College of William and Mary, the University of Michigan, Brown University, Cambridge University (Pitt Professor), and in 1982–83 he lectured for One Day 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.
Marriage and family
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.
In popular culture
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich publicly and effusively praised Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), erroneously calling it The Founding of America. 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."
In one of the celebrated scenes of the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon's title character gets into a battle of wits with a student from Harvard University, whom he accuses of uncritically parroting the views of the authors on his reading list as a first-year graduate student. He goes on to predict that a little later in his curriculum, he would simply be "regurgitating Gordon Wood." The student begins to respond with a critique of Wood, which Hunting interrupts, completes, and notes is plagiarized from Daniel Vickers' Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County.