Gordon Wood is presented with a National Humanities Medal during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2011.(Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images)
With his sober and serious scholarship, the historian was among the last of his generation.
In 1992, I joined one of National Review’s early cruises, where I found myself one night seated at dinner next to Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was about to become the first Republican Speaker of the House in almost 40 years — indeed, the first of my lifetime since Massachusetts’s Joseph Martin had surrendered the gavel in January 1955, a month before I was born. But Gingrich had older history on his mind that night. I was writing a book about George Washington; Gingrich urged me to read two books, Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood. ...
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