The great American historian Gordon Wood died yesterday at age 92 — not of the usual complaints of age, but because he was hit by a car in a supermarket parking lot in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was a professor emeritus at Brown University. It’s not only a tragedy for a man who was still an active historian, but also a loss for his country, a month before its own 250th birthday, to be deprived of one of the most eminent historians of the American Revolution. Perhaps the best-known of his books, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), argued that what began as an essentially conservative political revolution ended up having much wider social consequences in the way that early Americans thought about equality and individual dignity, leading to such developments as the decline of deference to “gentlemen” and the collapse of systems of unfree labor such as indentured servitude (as well as more questioning of slavery).

Wood, like Bernard Bailyn, James McPherson, or Sean Wilentz, brought an essentially mid-20th-century liberal point of view to American history. In recent years, that put him out of step with progressives who are much more hostile to the American Founding, with the result that Wood joined the chorus of critics of the 1619 Project; in 2019, he he joined an open letter to the New York Times and gave an interview to the World Socialist Website critiquing the venture, and in 2021, he dismantled radical professor Woody Holton in a debate on the Dunmore Proclamation. But his willingness to defend his own point of view was merely the exclamation point to a long career of writings on the Founding.

R.I.P.