Excerpt from the New York Times
Gordon S. Wood is more than an American historian. He is almost an American institution. Of all the many teachers and writers of history in this Republic, few are held in such high esteem. Part of his reputation rises from his productivity — a stream of books, monographs, articles, lectures and commentary. Now he has added “The Idea of America” (along with a new edition of John Adams’s Revolutionary writings in two volumes for the Library of America series).
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THE IDEA OF AMERICA
Reflections on the Birth of the United States
By Gordon S. Wood
385 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95.
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Excerpt: ‘The Idea of America’(Google Books)
More important than his productivity is the quality of his work, and its broad appeal to readers of the right, left and center — a rare and happy combination. Specially striking is Wood’s rapport with the young. In the film “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon and Ben Affleck centered a lively scene at a student hangout on an impassioned discussion of Wood’s work. The television sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” made “Gordon Wood” into an adjective, and used it as a synonym for serious scholarship in general. “Wicked awesome,” one character said, “all that Gordon Wood business!” Through it all, the man himself preserves a quiet modesty, and even a humility that is central to his work. He is respected not only for what he does but for who he is.
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Wood expanded the scale of his inquiries yet again in 2009 in another big book, “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815,” a volume in the excellent Oxford History of the United States. Here he links his earlier themes to an even larger transformation of an entire culture in its deepest values and purposes. This year he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. Altogether, Wood has done more than anyone to make the era of the Revolution and early Republic into one of the liveliest periods in American history.
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His work has made a difference in one more way. It reinforced the center when it was under heavy attack from both extremes. In a gentle reproof to scholars on the left, Wood has offered evidence that “what is extraordinary about the American Revolution is not . . . the continual deprivation and repression of the mass of ordinary people, but rather their release and liberation.” To conservatives on the right he makes very clear that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were conceived by their framers in dynamic terms, and were intended to grow.
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In all of this work, the strength of Wood’s scholarship derives from qualities of caution, balance and restraint that are uniquely his own. He avoids questions that cannot be answered by research, even questions of causation that engage most of his colleagues. Wood writes that “it is difficult, if not impossible, to apply the physical notion of ‘cause’ to human action.” He is mistaken here; other causal ideas go far beyond that physical model. But Wood’s approach is fundamental to his success. As a historian he asks not why people do things, but what they think they are doing, and how their thoughts have changed through time. Ideas are studied not as underlying motives for action, but in another way. Wood believes that “ideas and language give meaning to our actions, and there is almost nothing that we humans do to which we do not attribute meaning.”
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And on the “lessons of the past,” Wood is even more restrained. In his new book he observes: “If the study of history teaches anything, it teaches us the limitations of life. It ought to produce prudence and humility.” Gordon Wood teaches that lesson by the strength of his own example.