Archive for the ‘Donor News’ Category

Gordon S. Wood finds the work of the Jack Miller Center, “exhilarating and exciting.”

“The Jack Miller Center does great work in getting young scholars involved in the era of the founding,” says Professor Wood, one of the nation’s preeminent historians and a frequent participant at the Miller Center Summer Institutes.

Wood, a Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University, earned his doctorate at Harvard University and taught at the College of William and Mary, Harvard, the University of Michigan and Cambridge University before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” in 1993.

“The young people are so engaged and interested in this material; you just can’t help but be thrilled to be involved,” Wood says.

“The summer faculty development institutes are an integral part of our overall mission,” says Dr. Michael Andrews, Miller Center vice president of academic programs. “Each institute brings together 20 to 30 junior faculty members and advanced graduate students for workshops led by leading scholars, educators and intellectuals.”

A renowned scholar, Wood believes the summer institutes benefit everyone involved. “I am learning as much as the young scholars are learning,” Wood adds. “My thinking is affected by the exchanges that take place at the seminar.

“It’s important because these men who drafted the Constitution created the institutions and ideals by which we are governed,” Wood says. “They have created our identity. America is not a nation in th e usual sense of the term. We have no ethnic or tribal identity. Our nation is based on a set of beliefs and aspirations — equality, liberty, constitutionalism — that came out of the Revolution. We go back to the Revolution and the founding to find out who we are.

“That’s why we keep going back to the founders: to refresh and reaffirm our sense of identity. Our interest in the founding will continue as long as the United States exists.”

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See our video interview with Gordon Wood on the founders here.