I had been looking forward to an academic event this November, where I would have been with Gordon Wood. Few historians have shaped how I think and teach about the U.S. as much as Wood’s work has. A traffic accident has now deprived all of us of his wisdom.
I discovered it in August 1996. Ed Foster, then the graduate director of the economics Ph.D. program at Minnesota, insisted that I attend the summer math camp before my first year, so I arrived in Minneapolis in time for it. By the second day, I realized I already knew the material well enough (I had done a fair amount of math as an undergraduate), so I took the waiver exam and passed. That left me about three weeks before the semester began and little to do.
So I walked to the university bookstore, bought a standard survey textbook (These United States: The Questions of Our Past, by Irwin Unger), and read it cover to cover. My reasoning was simple. If I were going to spend at least the four or five years of a Ph.D. in the United States (yes, in those days a Ph.D. took four or five years), I ought to learn the basics of its history, beyond the handful of books I had read in Spain.
I found the subject fascinating, a strange mixture of things I recognized as a European and things wholly foreign to me. No era drew me more than the late colonial period, the Revolution, and the Early Republic. I began to read about them in earnest, a project I have kept up ever since, and in time I had the good fortune to teach them at Penn.
Among Unger’s recommendations for further reading was Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution. In contrast to the familiar narrative that set the conservative American Revolution against the violent French one, Wood argued that the social and political changes brought by independence from Britain were profoundly transformative.
He documented that the British colonies of North America began as a hierarchical world of patronage, dependency, and deference, held together by personal bonds and patriarchal authority. The republican phase of the Revolution attacked those ties in the name of virtue and disinterested public service, expecting a natural aristocracy of merit to govern for the common good.
But the logic of equality, once unleashed, overran that restraint and produced a democratic, commercial, individualistic society in which ordinary people’s private interests and the pursuit of money became legitimate and even celebrated. The Revolution destroyed aristocratic assumptions and made egalitarian, market-driven sociability the norm, an outcome the Founders neither intended nor fully welcomed.
After that book, I could never return to the old interpretations. I am not a specialist, so I will not try to adjudicate Wood’s reading, though I know many of his critics’ arguments. Suffice it to say that, whichever side of the debate you take, it is hard to imagine a serious course on the American Revolution that does not assign Wood.
Wood wrote many other fine books. My own favorite, and the one I tell my undergraduates to read first, is The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.
It is a sad indictment of American education that, even at Penn, most undergraduates know little about the Revolution before they take the course I taught for many years and that
@ferarteaga now teaches. Wood’s work is a good way in for anyone who wants to know more.