At Volokh Conspiracy, Steven Calabresi: Remembering Gordon Wood. From the introduction:
Gordon Wood was a towering scholar in every way. He was the best historian of the American Revolution and of the writing of the Constitution and, in general, of the period from 1760 to 1826, of all time. No-one else in the 237 years since the Constitution went into effect even comes close.
Gordon’s two biggest contributions were (1) in expanding our understanding of the American Revolution by defining it as a moment of radical political and societal transformation where an older world rooted in hereditary privilege was rejected in favor of republicanism and the equality of all human beings, and (2) in explaining how Americans came to put their faith in our written and amended Constitution. Gordon knew each of the Framers vividly, and he wrote about all of their lives. He described their virtues and vices with perfect precision. He was as institutionally honest an historian as one will ever find. He did not write hagiographies, but instead painted an accurate portrait of the great men he wrote about. He was as great an historian as Herodotus and Thucydides, which is high praise indeed.
Gordon was also a brave man—a public intellectual who was not afraid to challenge popular errors. He led the effort to denounce the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which argued that the Framers were all about slavery and the triumph of racism. Gordon earned some heated criticism for his courageous stance against the DEI effort to paint the founders as racist villains. To Gordon, the abolition of slavery, women’s right to vote, and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s followed from the founding principles in the Declaration of Independence.
And in conclusion;
Gordon Wood was both the best scholar ever of the American Founding, and a wonderful and virtuous human being.
Related: In the Wall Street Journal. Jack Baker: Gordon S. Wood, a Historian Who Loved America. From the introduction:
John Adams’s last words, on July 4, 1826, were “Jefferson still lives.” In the literal sense, he was wrong. Thomas Jefferson, his friend turned rival turned friend again, had died hours before. The two presidents—Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800—and drafters of the Declaration of Independence died on the same day, 50 years after that document’s adoption.
This is the sort of fact that Gordon S. Wood, the great historian of early America, could recall with ease across his many-decade career. But Wood, who died in a car accident Sunday at 92, was far more than a chronicler of this country’s founding. He did more than any other academic, and perhaps more than anyone in the past 50 years, to sustain the memory and importance of the Revolution and its principles.
Wood was born in Concord, Mass., where one of the first battles of the American Revolution was fought. He became known to the world in 1969 with his first book, “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.” It won the Bancroft Prize, one of the history profession’s highest honors.
With 1991’s “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” Wood achieved a popular renown unusual for an academic. His thesis, defended in careful, scholarly and erudite fashion, is also right there in the title and spelled out early and plainly in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Our revolution “did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder.”
UPDATE: Two essays at Civitas Outlook:
Wilfred McClay (Hillsdale): Gordon Wood Told the Truth About America
Steven Hayward (Civitas Institute): Gordon S. Wood’s American Revolution
(Via Scott Johnson at Powerline.)
Posted at 6:05 AM