“History is consoling,” Gordon S. Wood told me over lunch on Brown University’s campus in 2018. “It takes you off the roller coaster of emotions that this is the best of times or the worst of times.”

I was interviewing him about his book on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, “Friends Divided,” which described the brutal political polarization between Federalists and Republicans in the 1790s. Unlike many American historians, Wood aimed less to change the country than to understand it, and his deep understanding rendered him more equanimous about the state of American politics in the age of Trump than I was at age 24.

The eminent chronicler of America’s early history died last week at 92 after he was hit by a car in Rhode Island. Despite his conspicuous detachment from partisan politics, Wood inadvertently influenced modern government more than most scholars who set out to do so.

One window into his impact is the work of the U.S. Supreme Court. Wood is cited in at least 24 opinions in 22 high court cases to support arguments about the Constitution’s meaning. The citations are overwhelmingly to his first book, “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787,” published in 1969, when Wood was 35.

The book was highly regarded in the history profession, winning the Bancroft Prize, but it took 20 years for a justice to pick it up in an opinion. In 1989, the court struck down racial preferences in a city’s awarding of contracts by a 6-3 vote. Justice Antonin Scalia........

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