Historian Gordon Wood, Pioneer of Revolutionary Era Scholarship, Dies at 92

Gordon Wood, one of the most influential historians of the American Revolution, has died at 92, marking the end of an era in Revolutionary scholarship. Wood and his thesis adviser Bernard Bailyn (who died in 2020) fundamentally changed how historians approached the founding period by moving away from earlier interpretive frameworks—whether 19th-century mythologizing of the Founders, Civil War-era partisan narratives, or 20th-century Marxist class-based analyses. Instead, they carefully studied primary sources including revolutionary pamphlets and constitutional debates, taking the colonists' own arguments and ideas seriously on their own terms. Wood's major work, "The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787," documented how American political culture underwent fundamental transformation between the Revolutionary constitution-making of 1776 and the formation of the Constitution of 1787. This scholarly approach—understanding the 18th-century world in its own context rather than through modern ideological lenses—represented a significant methodological shift in American historiography.