Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who reshaped the study of the American Revolution and the early Republic, died on June 5, 2026, at the age of 92. He died at his home in Providence, Rhode Island. 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 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 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. In it, Wood wrote, “The American Revolution was as radical as any revolution in history, if we measure radicalism by the amount of social change that actually took place.” 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 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award. He also received the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brown University President Christina Paxson called him “one of the giants of American history,” saying he had transformed understanding of the Revolutionary era and the origins of the American Republic. Annette Gordon-Reed said he had a rare ability to synthesize political theory with lived experience, making the Founders feel “both human and heroic.” Wood himself said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. We study the past not to find lessons for the present, but to understand how we became who we are.”

His influence reached beyond the academy. He served as a trustee for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 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 Gerold 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.