America has lost one of its best historical thinkers. You may not have read any of the 15 books he wrote or edited. You may not have listened to any of his interviews or lectures, many of which are available online. And you may not have met him and seen firsthand the kind of gentleman he was. You may only have heard of him through the famous film Good Will Hunting, in which he received a name-drop in a memorable scene by actor Matt Damon.
Yet it is the height of irony that Gordon Wood came to the end of his life the year that the United States celebrates its 250 years of independence. Wood dedicated his life to the study of the American Revolution. In his 2011 book, The Idea of America, Wood argued that the Revolution was the most important single event in American history. He wrote, “Not only did the Revolution legally create the United States, but it infused into our culture all of our highest aspirations and noblest values.”
If Gordon Wood is unfamiliar to you, you ought to get to know him through his work. Perhaps his two most famous books are The Creation of the American Republic, 1776 –1787 and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for Creation in 1970 and the Pulitzer Prize for Radicalism in 1992. His Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789 –1815, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. He was presented with the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2011 in recognition for his invaluable contribution to our understanding of the American Revolution and its significance, not only to American history but to the history of Western civilization.
In his writing, Wood had a way of developing complex historical dynamics in a uniquely accessible way. His argument in Radicalism took on one of the most complex issues in American history, namely, the nature of the American Revolution and what it accomplished. Was the Revolution more of a conservative restoration of historic English conceptions of liberty? Was it mostly a war about political representation of the 13 American colonies in the so-called First British Empire? Or was there something about the Revolution that overturned something old and replaced it with something new? Wood argued that the American Revolution “was one of the greatest revolutions the world has known, a momentous upheaval that not only fundamentally altered the character of American society but decisively affected the course of subsequent history.”
In short, the Revolution was radical because it established a republican basis for social relationships in politics, economics, religion, and intellectual life for the first time in the modern period. Wood’s thesis is eminently simple but profound and innovative enough to represent a major contribution to how we think about our nation’s birth.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
John is a professor of church history and philosophy and chairman of the Church History Department at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
