Gordon Wood and the Historians Who Told the Real Story of the Founders

American historian Gordon Wood is a Pulitzer Prize- and Bancroft Prizewinning author and professor emeritus of history at Brown University. Peter Goldberg/Courtesy of Gordon Wood

Commentary

The sudden death of the historian Gordon Wood, just weeks before the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, is one more mark of the closure of a golden age of the historiography of the Revolutionary era. It’s an occasion to reflect on the uniqueness, indeed the idiosyncrasy, of the emergence of the primacy of this United States among the nations of the world.