The late historian who rekindled my hope for America’s future

Gordon Wood’s argument for the “radicalism” of the Revolution reveals something profound — and hopeful — about America.

America’s 250th birthday celebration feels like a child’s birthday party ruined by fighting between two soon-to-be-divorced parents. What should be a benign celebration of shared, if slightly boring, values has become a fully partisan affair.

In part, this is due to the president’s determination to make it all about himself. But the agita surrounding America 250 is not just about President Donald Trump’s garish White House UFC fight or poorly attended “Great American State Fair.” It is a reflection of a deeper division: a sense that Democratic and Republican partisans seem to have two wholly different visions of what the country is and should be. With partisan division enabling a president who aspires to kingly power, attempting to celebrate the republic’s extraordinary past can feel like willfully ignoring its parlous future.

Historian Gordon Wood, who died in June, was one of the greatest historians of the American Revolution. His famous book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, argued that the Revolution transformed America into a new kind of democratic society — outstripping even what the Founders themselves intended.

Near the end of his life, Wood wielded his view of the Revolution — as not just an event, but a set of ideas that defined a nation — against ascendant views on the radical left and right that described America as either a fundamentally racist project or a blood-and-soil ethnostate.

Wood’s vision is, polling data suggests, vastly more popular among Americans. Indeed, his death brought out tributes from figures on both the left and the right — suggesting that something like Wood’s patriotic vision can serve as a building block in reconstructing America after the current era of extreme polarization.

Yet amid this gloom, I found hope for the country in an unlikely source: a death. Or, more precisely, the reaction to it.

Gordon Wood was, for most of the year, the greatest living historian of the American Revolution — remaining remarkably sharp at age 92, over a decade after his retirement from Brown University. After Wood was fatally struck by a car on June 7, his death prompted an extraordinary wave of encomia from prominent figures across the political spectrum. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mourned him, as did Wood’s former student Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI). The Federalist Society, The Atlantic, and the New Republic all published tributes. Libertarian magazine Reason sung his praises, as did the World Socialist Web Site.

How could a single historian, writing a topic as familiar (and ideologically contested) as the American revolution, have such wide appeal? After reading Wood’s 1991 masterwork The Radicalism of the American Revolution, I can confidently say the book is brilliant: meticulously researched and compellingly argued. It also performs a fascinating bit of ideological work: a prescient pre-bunking of recently fashionable ideas, on both the radical left and right, that paint America as an ethno-nationalist project.

Wood’s America is a country defined not by blood, but by ideas: a revolutionary commitment to equality that began hypocritically but gave rise to the first truly democratic society in the world’s history.

That so many on both right and left still find something to admire in this vision suggests that Wood’s vision is not some kind of anachronism of the pre-Trump consensus, but a potential wellspring of unity in the 250 years to come. And it’s a reminder that the ideas of the Revolution — the ones Wood showed to be so powerfully influential — still define more of the country today than we often appreciate.

The Revolution, according to Gordon Wood

The Radicalism of the American Revolution is, at heart, an attempt to understand the revolution as a truly transformative event.

When Wood was writing, many historians argued that the Revolution — despite its name — wasn’t all that revolutionary. There was a short........

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