Pulitzer-winning historian Gordon S. Wood dies at 92 after being struck by car

Gordon S. Wood, the Pulitzer-winning historian whose scholarship shifted the study of the American Revolution toward questions of social structure and radical change, died Sunday after being struck by a car in East Providence, Rhode Island. He was 92.

According to East Providence police, as reported by the news outlet GoLocalProv.com, Wood was crossing a supermarket parking lot when he was struck. The driver remained at the scene and was cooperative, police said. Wood was transported to Rhode Island Hospital with serious injuries and later died.

Wood’s death was confirmed by his daughter, Amy Louise Wood, a historian at Illinois State University.

Wood was the Alva O. Way University Professor and professor of history emeritus at Brown University. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1993 for “The Radicalisation of the American Revolution,” which argued that the break with Britain was as much an internal social and political revolution as a colonial independence struggle.

His 1969 book “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787” won the Bancroft Prize for American history. Other major works included “Empire of Liberty,” a synthesis of the early national period, and “Revolutionary Characters,” a study of the Founding Fathers. The Washington Post, in an obituary published Monday, called his works “benchmarks of intellectual and social historiography” that helped reshape America’s origin story after World War II.

President Barack Obama awarded Wood the National Humanities Medal in 2011 for “scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the US Constitution.”

Wood also entered public controversy as a prominent critic of The New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project. He alleged the project encouraged a sense of “victimhood” and feeling “aggrieved,” even as he acknowledged he had not read most of it. Wood argued that the founders, including slaveholders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, believed — mistakenly, he said — that slavery would naturally die out, and that the Revolution itself energized the abolitionist movement. Slavery was not abolished in the United States until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.

Another prominent critic of the 1619 Project was President Donald Trump, who said in 2020 that the project “warped” the American story.

Wood was 92. His work, both acclaimed and contested, will continue to shape the study of America’s founding for generations.