The recent passing of Gordon S. Wood has shocked members of the early American historical community. Few scholars have left such a powerful mark on the scholarship of the Revolutionary era as Wood. Moreover, his many years serving as a professor, advisor, mentor, and colleague influenced no small number of historical practitioners. Here, four members of the scholarly community—Andrew Shankman, Karin Wulf, Paul A. Gilje, and Joseph M. Adelman—offer reflections on Wood’s role in their careers.

Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University, SHEAR President 2026-2027

When Gordon Wood died tragically, struck by a car, I lost my valued mentor. Our relationship began when I wrote, stamped, and mailed him a letter in 1997 asking him to be the outside reader for my dissertation. I explained that I disagreed with his views regarding the connections between democracy and capitalism, and therefore no scholar had forced me to consider more what I did think, given the power and breadth of his arguments.

I was shocked when Gordon agreed. And so, the day of my defense, for the first time I met Gordon S. Wood. He was kind but unpersuaded. Indeed, he recommended that I remove all references to him as they simply “aren’t convincing.” Then with a sheepish grin added, “well, at least not to me.” We didn’t see each other for a few years after that. Then we attended a small conference and decided to break away to the Keeneland racetrack, where I bet on the ponies and won. Was that when Gordon began to reevaluate my arguments? He certainly was impressed with my winnings (dumb luck—but I bought us two mint juleps each). No, he became even more critical of capitalism after 2000 (he was never a comfortable supporter); certainly, his approval of my arguments grew.

Yet whenever we disagreed, and we did as recently as 15 months ago at another great small conference he co-hosted with Jack Greene, he’d argue some variant of “well, nobody important thought that way.” He liked to say I had a close relationship with marginal nutcases. And, as with so many other things, he was right. My wonderful friend Gordon was the exception though. I shall miss him terribly.

Paul A. Gilje, University of Oklahoma

Gordon Wood’s seminar on the American Revolution and the Early Republic in the spring of 1975 changed my life.  First, Wood emphasized how the past was fundamentally different from the present and that it was the historian’s task to read everything possible, and explain that past to others.  We were advised to approach history the way an anthropologist studied a different culture and, citing Clifford Geertz, we were to understand the different meanings of simple actions, like a nod or a wink.  Next, Wood emphasized that history centered on understanding change through time – without change, he admonished, there is no history.  Think here, how both Creation of the American Republic and The Radicalism of the American Revolution centered on the changes that accompanied the Revolution and how Wood redefined the field of the American Revolution to include the Early Republic (making an organization like SHEAR possible).  But if change happens, Wood taught us, it was not the changes driven by great minds with some master plan.  Instead, like sociologist Robert K. Merton, planned changes had unintended consequences and were often driven by efforts to comprehend anomalies within the larger intellectual framework (think here of the work of Thomas Kuhn on Scientific Revolutions).  For the next half century I strove to teach these same lessons to legions of students and sought to incorporate Wood’s understanding of the historical process in my own published work.

Karin Wulf, John Carter Brown Library and Brown University

I read Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969) as an undergraduate. The fact that I was glued to this (substantial) text over a weekend, hunched on my dorm room bunkbed, was just one of the signs that maybe I wasn’t going to be a journalist after all. Over the decades I had many reasons to disagree with Gordon Wood, sometimes sharply and publicly, about the state and direction of our field. But we always agreed about the signal importance of early America as the foundational history of this country. One of the pleasures of moving to Rhode Island was getting to interact with Gordon more directly, including at an event last year at the John Carter Brown Library where we talked about Creation. I re-read it, my college copy in fact which he signed that night, along with the 50th anniversary reflections in the New England Quarterly and some of the early reviews. I asked Gordon whether he thought about the tides of interest in the founding, and he said no, that it was constant in part because “the Constitution is at the center of our lives.” I didn’t ask him then, though a little bit over dinner, about the things I thought he’d gotten wrong (sometimes really wrong). I had just read his last book Power and Liberty for an event with Brown alums, and I was looking forward to talking with him about some howlers there; I’ll tell you, dear reader, that among other things he should have read Susan Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions. It’s a poignant loss in this semiquincentennial year.

Joseph M. Adelman, Framingham State University

One of the slow realizations that occurred for me during college and graduate school is that the historians whose books we read in class are actually real people and not just mythical names on a dust jacket. But there are a few exceptions for everyone, and for me, Gordon Wood has always been one of them—a presence but not necessarily a complete person. Part of that is circumstantial: I only met Wood a few times in real life. The most recent time, at an event at Brown last October, he at first assumed I was a graduate student (I’ve reached an age where that is a high compliment). But that means that most of our relationship has been parasocial, as I’ve encountered, grappled, and argued with him and his ideas and his standing in the profession and American culture.

Reading Creation inspired me to pursue the scholarly questions that have shaped my own work. The breadth of the work, the attention to the details of Revolutionary-era political writings, all pointed the way for me. Now, to be sure, I had my own questions about the book (namely, how all of these ideas circulated and physically moved from place to place). His biography of Franklin, which came out right as I began graduate school, pointed out new ways to think effectively and critically about the founding generation. At the same time, I reacted like many in the profession when I read Radicalism, and used that frustration to spur my own thinking. As another white man working on political history, I did not want to fall into the same trap of defining “the people” so precisely that it excluded and erased the diversity of the American experience in the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, Radicalism did serve as a kind of cautionary point of optimism: if it took the mythical GORDON WOOD over twenty years to write his second book, I shouldn’t feel so bad about how long my own has been taking.

Finally, Wood stood out in the public square. Everybody knows who he is—my extended family, the other parents at school plays and ballgames, colleagues in other fields. He wasn’t on social media (more power to him), but his ethereal presence served as a foil and spur for debate about hot-button issues long before the 1619 Project and the Semiquincentennial. His work and contributions are complete, but I and we will probably still be arguing with him for many years to come.