Gordon Wood
Tufts President Lawrence S. Bacow awarded Gordon Wood an honorary degree during the University's 154th Commencement ceremonies on Sunday, May 23, 2010.
Gordon Wood, you eloquently remind us that American identity is profoundly connected to the ideals and values that came out of the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution: “To be an American,” as you put it, “is not to be somebody, but to believe in something.” You have shown better than anyone else how an era that was far from democratic unleashed the energies and ideas that led to our own, very different, society. From the beginning of your career, you have had a rare ability to combine intensive research with broad interpretive vision. You have become the preeminent scholar of the Revolution and the early Republic while demonstrating that history of the highest distinction can reach a broad public. In the midst of this scholarly career, you also served Tufts as a Trustee from 1992 to 2002. Gordon Wood, you have shown us how the meaning of the United States has evolved over time, and helped us to understand the role of both ideas and individuals in that unfolding process. For your unique contributions to historical scholarship and our understanding of the American past, your alma mater gratefully presents you with the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.
Biography:
For Gordon S. Wood, A55, history teaches one thing above all: wisdom. That might be the most important lesson he has imparted in his numerous prize-winning books and in the classroom, he says. The Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus at Brown University, Wood has written that history tells us “how we might live in the world.”
Born in Concord, Massachusetts, it was perhaps fitting that Wood was drawn to the study of early American history. After receiving his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Tufts University, he spent three years in the U.S. Air Force. He soon returned to academia, earning an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
After brief stints on the faculties at William and Mary, Harvard, and the University of Michigan, in 1969 he was appointed an associate professor at Brown University, where he taught history for nearly forty years. He specialized in the history of the American Revolution and its critical importance to the development of American society. From a nation founded by aristocrats, he says, the democratic impulse led to the creation of an entirely new political reality, one in which common men and women could easily rise to power.
As an historian, Wood writes with academic authority for popular audiences. His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History, and his most recent work, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, published last year by Oxford University Press, won the 2010 American Publishers Association Prize for History and Biography, and the American History Book Prize from the New-York Historical Society. His first book, Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970. For many years, he has also written lengthy reviews for the New York Review of Books and The New Republic, and collected some of those pieces in the 2008 book The Purpose of the Past.
“Most people think of history as just dealing with the past,” Wood said in a 2008 interview with C-SPAN. But “when you have a historical sense, you see reality differently. It opens a whole new dimension on the world.” Wood argues that history doesn’t teach what he calls “little lessons.” Instead, he says, “it teaches one big lesson: that nothing really works out . . . as the participants who launched it expected.”
Wood is careful not to impose present knowledge on his historical subjects, nor judge them solely by current standards. “Our goal as critical historians is to recover the past as accurately as possible,” he says. “Good history gives us a tragic view of life, that is, not a pessimistic view, but a sense of the limitations of life, that not everything is possible, and few of us understand the situation we are in.”
History that is not read by large numbers of people is not fulfilling its responsibilities, Wood has said, and at times he has taken fellow historians to task for not considering readers outside of the academy. His own books, by contrast, are widely read, garnering enthusiastic reviews from critics and readers alike.
Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was a trustee of Tufts University from 1992 to 2002 and of Colonial Williamsburg from 1993 to 2006.
And although he recently became an emeritus professor, he notes, “I’ve retired from teaching, but not from history.”