Prof. Gordon S. Wood Dies in Supermarket Parking Lot
- Bill McNeely
- Jun 8
- 2 min read
Gordon S. Wood, Prof. Emeritus of American History at Brown, died at age 92 over the weekend. Mr. Wood was fatally struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot on Taunton Ave. in East Providence. (Honest!)
Many of us knew Mr. Wood, about as distinguished a historian of the American Revolutionary period as there was in the last half of the 20th century and early 21st. He arrived at Brown in the late 1960's, overlapping for a few years with another giant of the period's history, Carl Bridenbaugh.
Wood's books were well known. His epic Creation of the American Republic, his first book and an expansion of his Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard, won a Bancroft prize. He received a Pulitzer in History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution in 1993, and was a finalist for another for Empire of Liberty. I felt one of his best was The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, a really fresh take on Franklin's life and career. He also received a National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2011.
Wood was an undergrad at Tufts, and got his doctorate under Bernard Bailyn at Harvard. He was very much part of the "new look" at the American Revolution as not just a string of military battles, but a realization of ideas whose time had come, and would change the world.
Known for his even-handedness and fact-based, rather than ideology-based, approach, Wood was frustratingly non-radical himself for many younger drum-pounding scholars. He thought the founding fathers flawed, sometimes mistaken, and imperfect human beings, who nonetheless accomplished great things. At the end of the course I took with him, he said the real message of the revolution and America itself was egalitarianism - that our belief in equality was what made us Americans.
Unsurprisingly, then, he considered slavery a cancer "eating away at the message of liberty and equality."
Wood entered the popular media when he was "quoted" by Matt Damon's character in the film Good Will Hunting. Wood insisted he endorsed none of the views Damon ascribed to him, and the record bears him out.
Please drive carefully in grocery store parking lots! The life you save may be mine.
I heard on the radio that a 92 yr old historian was killed in a traffic accident in Providence and immediately wondered if there was a Brown connection. Thank you for your meticulously detailed homage to this important Brunonian, Bill.