Gordon Wood is dead; long live Gordon Wood

America has lost one of its best historical thinkers. You may not have read any of the 15 books he wrote or edited. You may not have listened to any of his interviews or lectures, many of which are available online. And you may not have met him and seen firsthand the kind of gentleman he was. You may only have heard of him through the famous film Good Will Hunting, in which he received a name-drop in a memorable scene by actor Matt Damon.

Yet it is the height of irony that Gordon Wood came to the end of his life the year that the United States celebrates its 250 years of independence. Wood dedicated his life to the study of the American Revolution. In his 2011 book, The Idea of America, Wood argued that the Revolution was the most important single event in American history. He wrote, “Not only did the Revolution legally create the United States, but it infused into our culture all of our highest aspirations and noblest values.”

If Gordon Wood is unfamiliar to you, you ought to get to know him through his work. Perhaps his two most famous books are The Creation of the American Republic, 1776 –1787 and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for Creation in 1970 and the Pulitzer Prize for Radicalism in 1992. His Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789 –1815, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. He was presented with the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2011 in recognition for his invaluable contribution to our understanding of the American Revolution and its significance, not only to American history but to the history of Western civilization.

In his writing, Wood had a way of developing complex historical dynamics in a uniquely accessible way. His argument in Radicalism took on one of the most complex issues in American history, namely, the nature of the American Revolution and what it accomplished. Was the Revolution more of a conservative restoration of historic English conceptions of liberty? Was it mostly a war about political representation of the 13 American colonies in the so-called First British Empire? Or was there something about the Revolution that overturned something old and replaced it with something new? Wood argued that the American Revolution “was one of the greatest revolutions the world has known, a momentous upheaval that not only fundamentally altered the character of American society but decisively affected the course of subsequent history.”

In short, the Revolution was radical because it established a republican basis for social relationships in politics, economics, religion, and intellectual life for the first time in the modern period. Wood’s thesis is eminently simple but profound and innovative enough to represent a major contribution to how we think about our nation’s birth.

Since Wood’s death on June 7, some have paid tribute to him by forlornly observing that there will never be another American historian like Gordon Wood. Nonsense. While it is beyond dispute that Wood was uniquely gifted, prolific, and insightful, what made him truly great was his quality as a virtuous historical thinker who taught history for citizenship. That quality is available to any of us who would strive for it, whether we are historians by profession or by personal interest.

Wood loved America, and he understood that love for America and its history did not necessitate hagiography. Wood’s fascination with the early years of our national existence was rooted in a desire to understand the people, events, and ideas of the American world of the late 18th century. He was impatient with historians and writers who searched for nuggets in history that could be used to advance contemporary political ideologies and agendas. His 2008 work, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, is a collection of book reviews he had written over the course of decades. Many of the essays in that book take historians to task for their tendency to politicize history in their books. The fallacy of special pleading can take many forms, and Wood showed that historians are often guilty of committing it, sometimes unintentionally.

Wood was uniquely critical of the cynical work by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project. Wood found in Hannah-Jones’ work an example of a narrative that was nakedly partisan and ideological. He was joined in his criticism by notable historians such as Allen Guelzo, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Victoria Bynum, and several others. Wood did the country a great service to remind us that good historical thinking must begin with a desire to understand the past with the virtues of humility and wisdom. Wood understood better than most what novelist L. P. Hartley meant when he said, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

Gordon Wood has been an inspiration to thousands as one who employed virtuous historical thinking. A Harvard Ph.D., winner of the highest awards available to a historian, professor at Harvard, Cambridge, the University of Michigan, William and Mary, and Brown, student of the great Bernard Bailyn, and a scholar whose career spanned seven decades—he was a gentleman, and he treated people with grace, affability, and sincere care. He loved his country, was thankful for all the blessings that came with belonging to it, and wanted his fellow citizens to more fully come to grips with its historical flaws, vicissitudes, triumphs, and its future promise.

While we can mourn the passing of a truly great man, we need not despair that he is the last of a dying breed. We can raise ourselves up to follow his example: to love America by thinking virtuously about its past, which begins by cultivating virtue in our own lives. We best tell the American story when we are in pursuit of truth in line with the Apostle Paul’s admonition: “[love] does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.”