(PD) Thomas Kidd–An Intellectual Feast: Reflections on the Death of Gordon Wood 

Gordon S. Wood, the great historian of the American founding, died at ninety-two on June 7, just weeks shy of the 250th anniversary of American independence. This coincidence does not quite possess the providential aura of Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s deaths on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. But Wood’s death offers an important opportunity to reflect on his brilliant contributions to American history, and to lament the passing of a great generation of historians, including Wood, who came of age during and after World War II. We’re not likely to see a generation of scholars like Wood’s again, nor would the elite academy welcome them if we did. 

In the mid-1990s, I was admitted to Brown University to work with Wood for a Ph.D. Alas, Brown had no stipend for an iffy candidate from a southern public school, so I went elsewhere. But Wood’s works, especially The Creation of the American Republic (1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), seeped into my bones anyway. As I have returned to my yellowed copies of his books in the days since his passing, I find myself regularly reminded of ideas about the Revolution and the Founders that I first learned from him. Now I just teach them as historical givens. 

Wood’s professional genealogy helps explain his trajectory as a scholar. His career was connected to three other major figures of American historical scholarship. The first was Bernard Bailyn, Wood’s doctoral adviser and longtime Harvard historian who died in 2020 at age ninety-seven. Then there was Edmund Morgan, Bailyn’s contemporary who taught at Brown for a decade before moving to Yale in the mid-1950s. Bailyn and Morgan both studied at Harvard with the legendary Perry Miller, one of the most influential American historians of the twentieth century. 

In this essay there’s no space to summarize the works of these four titans. But if you pick up a book by any of them, you’ll be treated to an intellectual feast. And Gordon Wood was part of a historiographical tradition that began with Miller.  

Read it all.

"Though America’s ideals were riddled with ironies and inconsistencies, the nation still emerged as a global beacon of ordered liberty. No one better explained the history and significance of that American nation than Gordon Wood." My essay at @PublicDiscourse…

— Thomas S. Kidd (@ThomasSKidd) July 17, 2026