Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who reshaped the study of the American Revolution and the early Republic, died on June 7, 2026, at the age of 92. He died at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, from injuries he suffered after being struck by a car in East Providence earlier that day. His work helped move Revolutionary scholarship toward the history of ideas and then pushed it further, arguing that the Revolution was not just a transfer of power but a force of deep social change.

Born in Concord, Massachusetts, and raised in Worcester and Waltham, Wood came to history through a path that mixed public service and long academic apprenticeship. He graduated from Tufts University summa cum laude, then served in the United States Air Force in Japan. After that he earned his master’s and doctorate at Harvard University, studying under Bernard Bailyn, one of the era’s leading historians. He taught at the College of William & Mary, Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining Brown University, where he became the Alva O. Way University Professor and remained a central figure for decades.

His breakthrough came with The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which won the Bancroft Prize and, as the Journal of American History has noted, shifted attention in Revolutionary scholarship toward the history of ideas. Wood’s argument changed the terms of the field. He made the founding look less like a tidy constitutional settlement than a moment of intellectual upheaval, and he kept widening that view in later work.

That argument reached a broader public in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award. In it, Wood argued that if radicalism is measured “by the amount of social change that actually took place,” then the Revolution “was not conservative at all; on the contrary, it was as radical and as revolutionary as any in history.” He later extended his interpretation in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, part of the Oxford History of the United States, and in The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, which won the Julia Ward Howe Prize. He also received the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award from the Society of American Historians and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brown University President Christina Paxson called him “a preeminent scholar of American history” who “helped countless readers understand the events and forces that led to the birth of the United States with depth, nuance and clarity,” and mourned “the loss of a towering historian whose insights will inform both academic scholarship and public understanding for generations to come.” Karin Wulf, director of the John Carter Brown Library, called him “genuinely the preeminent historian of the American founding period,” a loss made sharper by its timing in the nation’s semiquincentennial year.

His influence reached beyond the academy. He served on the board of trustees of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal for his contributions to the study of American history. A 1997 reference in Good Will Hunting brought his name to a wider audience, but his lasting public reach came from something deeper: he helped Americans see their founding as an argument over ideas, power and social order, not a finished myth.

Wood married Louise Goss in 1956, and they had three children, Christopher, Elizabeth and Amy. He leaves behind a body of work that changed how Americans think about their founding, especially the ideas, ambitions and contradictions that made the republic.