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.
As the historian Walter McDougall has pointed out, a catalog of world civilizations in the year 1600 looks, with one exception, much like the world today. There is a prosperous and populous China at one end of Eurasia and a prosperous and populous Europe at the other. There is a bustling Indian subcontinent and a vast and little-visited Africa, and large Euro-indigenous cultures in Mexico and South America.
The great difference is the emergence, from what was a sparsely populated and isolated realm, of the great world power of the United States of America.
How this nation emerged, and how it was formed and unified in the pivotal final years of the 18th century, has come to be understood anew thanks to a generation of historians who began their work in the postwar decades more than 50 years ago and continued it into their 90s. Among the pioneers were Gordon Wood, who died this week at 92, and his thesis adviser Bernard Bailyn, who died in 2020 at 97.
Before their generation, American historiography often was more about the presumptions of the writers than the makers of history. Early 19th-century historians glorified, even mythologized, the Founding Fathers. The tragic losses of the Civil War prompted Northerners to lament antebellum statesmen’s failure to compromise and Southerners to canonize the champions of the Lost Cause.
Early 20th-century progressives, influenced by Marxist assumptions about economic class warfare, tried to prove that colonists led a revolution against Britain and then wrote a constitution all to protect their wealth against redistribution. Then, in what I have called the “Midcentury Moment” during and after World War II, some historians abjured class warfare and argued that Americans shared a consensus all along.
Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood did something else. They read the patriots’ words more carefully and took their arguments seriously. They studied the numerous pamphlets from the revolutionary 1760s and 1770s, as well as the debates over the new republic in the 1780s and 1790s.
They understood that Americans, imbued with British ideas of freedom but blessedly distant from British authorities, could write with more frankness than past political theorists under the close supervision of monarch and church, and with no motive to conceal motivation from the then nonexistent Marxian or Freudian theorists. They did the real work of history: understanding a society familiar in some respects but strange in so many others.
“The approach of many historians to the American Revolution, it seemed, had too often been deeply ahistorical; there had been too little sense of the irretrievability and differentness of the eighteenth-century world,” Gordon Wood wrote in 1969 in his preface to The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. “When I began to compare the debates surrounding the Revolutionary constitution-making of 1776 with those surrounding the formation of the Constitution of 1787, I realized that a fundamental transformation of political culture had taken place.”
This is a history of unanticipated events changing minds. As Bernard Bailyn wrote in 1967 in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, “The details of this new world were not as yet clearly depicted; but faith ran high that a better world than any that had ever been known could be built where authority was distrusted and held in constant scrutiny; where the status of men flowed from their achievements and from their personal qualities, not from distinctions ascribed to them at birth; and where the use of power over the lives of men was jealously guarded and severely restricted.”
Wood’s central thesis in his 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution was that the revolution declared in 1776 had transformed the character of the American people. They realized that what held them together “could not be the traditional ethnic, religious, and tribal loyalties of the Old World” and instead “found new democratic adhesives in the actual behavior of plain ordinary people—in the everyday desire to make money and pursue happiness in the here and now.”
Writing in National Review last January, Wood celebrated “five significant words that came to define American culture—‘all men are created equal.’” This prompted them to create “numerous learned academies and historical societies,” including “mechanic societies, humane societies, societies for the prevention of pauperism, orphans’ asylums, missionary societies, marine societies, tract societies, Bible societies, temperance associations, Sabbatarian groups, peace societies, societies for the suppression of vice and immorality, societies for the relief of poor widows, societies for the promotion of industry.”
Wood was among the multiple leading historians who criticized the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones’s argument that 1619, the importation of the first slave in the colonies, was the real founding of America. Instead, he argued it was the revolution that led to the unraveling of slavery.
“Although many modern historians have called the Revolution’s inability to free all the slaves its greatest failure, they have committed the great sin of anachronism by assuming that everyone in the past must have known that slavery was an evil,” he wrote in January. “These historians have not fully appreciated that the Revolution defied a world that for the millennia had taken slavery for granted. It was the Revolution that for the first time in history made slavery a problem, and it led to the first instance of states’ abolishing the practice.”
Wood has been critical as well of the notion, recently mentioned without disapproval by Vice President JD Vance, that those with American ancestors in the Civil War era are somehow more American than those whose ancestors arrived later. Contrary to Europe, “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” he said in his November 2025 Irving Kristol lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. “To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.” Such as “the powerful sense of equality” that “is what makes us one people.”
OPINION: WHAT THE FOUNDERS ACTUALLY MEANT BY ORIGINALISM
We are unlikely to hear much more from the last survivors of the two generations of academic and popular historians who made the final third of the 20th century a golden age for the history of the founding. In the universities, most have been replaced by academics with different interests and a more adversarial approach to the nation whose bounty and freedoms make their work possible.
But on the 251st Fourth of July upcoming, and in months and years to come, it should be refreshing to dip into their rich works and gain more knowledge of, and appreciation for, the wondrous deeds of those who came before us and of whom we are the fortunate, if too often the ungrateful, heirs.