In the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon’s character taunts a snobbish Harvard undergraduate: “You’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.” Ideas, Wood took pains to point out, that he didn’t actually endorse.

In the ensuing years, people would often try to pigeonhole, or even misrepresent, Wood’s scholarship. To pretend that his views were theirs. What they unintentionally revealed, however, was what a towering figure Wood was in his discipline. He was an academic giant in an era and field increasingly filled with pygmies.

Wood was born, appropriately enough, in Concord, Massachusetts, not far from the first battlefields of the American Revolution. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force, he obtained a Ph.D. in history at Harvard, studying under Bernard Bailyn, a doyen of the studies that Wood would devote his life to. 

It would be but a small exaggeration to say that Bailyn and Wood were the two most influential scholars of the American Revolution in the last eight decades. Bailyn died in 2020 at 98. Both were active until the very end. With Wood’s passing, a certain type of scholar, and scholarship, is arguably gone — one hopes not forever.

For Wood, academic success came early. His 1969 book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 1970. It was based, in large measure, on his dissertation completed a mere five years before. 

In 1969, Wood joined the faculty at what would become his longtime home, Brown University. From there, he would spend the next half-century exploring the intellectual history behind what he would call “the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history,” the Revolution.

Wood was able to see the American Revolution for what it transparently was: a very unique thing. The Revolution, he wrote, did more than create a nation. It transformed American society. 

Almost overnight, Americans became “the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world.” And this transformation took place “without industrialization, without urbanization, without railroads, without the aid of any of the great forces we usually invoke to explain ‘modernization.’” It was truly a movement of the mind, body, and spirit. 

Wood spent his entire career exploring how this came to be. He never seemed to lose his curiosity or enthusiasm. By all accounts, he was approachable and welcoming. 

He didn’t seem to believe that a privileged perch in the Ivory Tower should make one inaccessible, or that academics should argue purely among themselves in peer-reviewed papers that no one else reads. He thought the American Revolution was special, and he wanted to share and debate why with the broader public.

SEAN DURNS: AMERICA HAS BEEN BLESSED WITH GREAT LEADERS

Wood stood athwart current trends in his field, warning that to focus on what the Revolution didn’t accomplish, its failure to abolish slavery, enfranchise women, etc., was to miss the fact that it made those future movements “and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking” possible. This endeared him to many conservatives who tried to claim him as their own.

But Wood and his body of work transcend the politics and pop culture of here and now. He was a scholar, in the old-fashioned and tragically archaic sense of the word. And like all good scholars, his work will live on to be read by future generations. 

As Winston Churchill famously said, “Words are the only thing that last forever.” One imagines that a life-long student of Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries would agree.

Sean Durns (@seandurns) is deputy commentary editor of the Washington Examiner.