Gordon S Wood

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years.”—Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers

A magnificent account of the revolution in arms...

“I cannot remember ever reading a work of history and biography that is quite so fluent, so perfectly composed and balanced . . .” —The New York Sun

“Exceptionally rich perspective on one of the most accomplished, complex, and unpredictable Americans of his own time or any other.” —The Washington Post Book World

From the most respected chronicler of the early days of the Republic—and...

An erudite scholar and an elegant writer, Gordon S. Wood has won both numerous awards and a broad readership since the 1969 publication of his widely acclaimed The Creation of the American Republic. With The Purpose of the Past, Wood has essentially created a history of American history, assessing the current state of history vis-à-vis the work of some of its most important scholars-doling out praise and scorn with equal measure....

Grand in scope, rigorous in its arguments, and elegantly synthesizing thirty years of scholarship, Gordon S. Wood's Pulitzer Prize-winning book analyzes the social, political, and economic consequences of 1776. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood depicts not just a break with England, but the rejection of an entire way of life: of a society with feudal dependencies, a politics of patronage, and a world view in which people were divided...

The preeminent historian of the Founding Era reflects on the birth of American nationhood and explains why the American Revolution remains so essential.
For Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood, the American Revolution is the most important event in our history, bar none. Since American identity is so fluid, we have had to continually return to our nation’s founding to understand who we are. In a series of illuminating essays,...

"Traces John Adams's career from his leading role in the debate over independence, [...] to his tireless efforts to establish the fledgling government of the United States and supply its army in the filed, to his crucial diplomatic service in Europe [...]. It includes his hightly influential 1776 pamphlet Thoughts on Government, dozens of his characteristically frank and revealing personal letters, [...] extensive diary excerpts. "--Jacket.

"From more than a thousand pamphlets published on both sides of the Atlantic during the period [of 1764-1776], acclaimed historian Gordon S. Wood has selected thrity-nine of the most influential and emblematic to reveal as never before how this momentous revolution unfolded. Here, in the first volume of a two-volume set, are nineteen works from the trans-Atlantic debate triggered by Parliament's imposition of new taxes and regulations designed to...

"For the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution, the leading historian of the era presents a landmark two-volume edition of the thirty-nine pamphlets charting the course of the political crisis that led to independence. This second volume includes twenty works from the crucial years when the debate turned from issues of representation and consent to the fateful question of where sovereignty would ultimately reside in the British...