Gordon S Wood, a Pulitzer prize-winning author and historian, was killed on Sunday when he was struck by a car in a supermarket parking lot in Rhode Island.
Wood, 92, won the Pulitzer in 1993 in the history category for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a landmark tome that advanced the theory of the break with Britain being at least as much of an internal social and political transformation as a desire to be rid of colonial masters.
According to East Providence police, as reported by the news outlet golocalprov.com, Wood was hit by a car as he crossed the supermarket’s parking lot. The driver remained at the scene and was cooperative, police said.
Police said Wood was brought to Rhode Island hospital with “serious injuries”, from which he later died.
Wood was the Alva O Way University Professor and professor of history emeritus at Brown University. The local outlet said he was “the leading Revolutionary era historian” for his “unmatched” list of academic awards over the last half century.
His other prominent books included The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which was written in 1969; Empire of Liberty, an account of the early years of the United States; and Revolutionary Characters, a biography of the founding fathers who shaped the new republic.
Among his other awards were the 1970 Bancroft prize for literature about the history of America; and the National Humanities Medal, presented at the White House by Barack Obama in March 2011, “for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the US constitution”.
His works, according to a Washington Post obituary published on Monday, “were considered benchmarks of intellectual and social historiography” that helped reshape America’s origin story in the years after the second world war.
Wood was a prominent critic of the New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project and its contention, which was later amended, that maintaining slavery was a key motivation for the American Revolution.
He alleged the project encouraged a sense of “victimhood” and feeling “aggrieved”, even as he acknowledged he had not read most of it.
Another prominent critic of that contention was Donald Trump. The president said in 2020 that the 1619 Project “warped” the American story and claimed the US was “founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom”.
American children, Trump said, should know “they are citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world”.
Wood said the founders, including even plantation owners Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, believed, mistakenly, that slavery would die a natural death and the revolution itself energized the American abolitionist movement.
Slavery in the US was not abolished until after the civil war, when the 13th amendment to the federal constitution was ratified in December 1865.
Woods’ death was confirmed by his daughter, Amy Louise Wood, a historian at Illinois State University.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
