Gordon S. Wood
Gordon Stewart Wood (born November 27, 1933) is an American historian and professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). His book The Creation of the Ameri
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Gordon Stewart Wood (born November 27, 1933) is an American historian and professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969) won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University in 1955 and has served as a trustee there. After serving in the United States Air Force in Japan, during which time he earned an A.M. at Harvard University, he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard, where he studied under Bernard Bailyn, receiving his Ph.D. in 1964.
Wood has taught at Harvard University, the College of William and Mary, the University of Michigan, Brown University, and in 1982–83 was Pitt Professor at Cambridge University.
In addition to his books (listed below), Wood has written numerous influential articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966), "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth century" (1982), and "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution" (1987). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.
A recent project was the third volume of the Oxford History of the United States – Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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