In addition to his books (listed below), Wood has written numerous influential articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the
American Revolution" (1966), "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century" (1982), and "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the
Constitution" (1987). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story (2019), Wood addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative. He focused on the idea of equality as "the most radical and most powerful ideological force" that the
American Revolution unleashed. "This powerful sense of equality is still alive and well in America, and despite all of its disturbing and unsettling consequences, it is what makes us one people."[2]
Wood was elected as a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988[3] and the
American Philosophical Society in 1994.[4]
In popular culture
Speaker of the HouseNewt Gingrich publicly and effusively praised Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). Wood, who met Gingrich once in 1994, surmised that Gingrich may have approved because the book "had a kind of Toquevillian touch to it, I guess, maybe suggesting American exceptionalism, that he liked". He jokingly described Gingrich's praise in an interview on
C-SPAN in 2002 as "the kiss of death for me among a lot of academics, who are not right-wing Republicans."[5]
Wood was mentioned in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. In one scene,
Matt Damon's character mentions Gordon Wood while standing up to a Harvard student who is ridiculing
Ben Affleck's character at a bar. He accuses the Harvard student of shallowly reiterating ideas he has encountered in his coursework, telling him that soon he would be "regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about [...] the pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization."[6] Wood said of the scene, "That’s my two seconds of fame! More kids know about that than any of the books I have written."[7] This scene was later parodied by the television show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in which the character
Charlie Kelly attempts to "pull a Good Will Hunting" and asks "does no one know who Gordon Wood is?"
Personal life
Wood married the former Louise Goss on April 30, 1956. They have three children.[1]
Monarchism and Republicanism in the Early United States. (Melbourne, Australia:
La Trobe University, 2000.
Co-Author
(With
J.R. Pole) Social Radicalism and the Idea of Equality in the American Revolution. Houston, Texas:
University of St. Thomas, 1976.
(With others) The Great Republic. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977; 4th ed.: Lexington, Massachusetts:
Heath, 1992.
Book chapters
(Contributor) Leadership in the American Revolution. Washington, DC:
Library of Congress, 1974.
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture. Peter Onuf and Jan Lewis (eds.), Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1999.
^Claybourn, Joshua, ed. (2019). Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books. pp. 55–65.
ISBN978-1640121706.