Gordon Wood, widely regarded as the Dean of the American Revolution, will not live to see the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. The renowned author and professor was killed in a traffic accident in East Providence, Rhode Island. He was 92.It’s rare for an academic to enter the depths of popular culture. But the self-effacing Wood did precisely that, garnering unlikely attention thanks to the unlikely combination of Matt Damon and Newt Gingrich.Shortly after taking power in the 1994 Republican Revolution, the new Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, hailed Wood’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood joked that the endorsement from the conservative leader was “the kiss of death for me among a lot of academics, who are not right-wing Republicans.”
Gordon S. Wood worked to deepen understanding of the forces and events that led to the birth of the United States. (Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis, via Getty Images)
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.
