Gordon Wood obit

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author and Historian Gordon Wood Hit and Killed by Motorist

 He was not on the list.

On Sunday, one of Rhode Island’s most accomplished writers and historians, Gordon Wood, was hit and killed by a motorist.

 

He was 92.

Wood won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize.

Wood was one of America’s most accomplished scholars on the American Revolution — he won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for his work The Radicalism of the American Revolution. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

He was the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. His list of academic awards over the past 50 years is unmatched - he is the leading Revolutionary era historian.

Police Report

East Providence Police reported that on Sunday, “officers were dispatched to the Shaw's Supermarket parking lot on Taunton Avenue for a report of a pedestrian struck by a motor vehicle. Upon the officer's arrival, they began treating a 92-year-old male from Providence who sustained serious injuries in the crash. The male was transported to Rhode Island Hospital, where he later succumbed to his injuries.”

According to the East Providence Police:

"The female operator of the vehicle remained on scene and is cooperating with investigators. The Traffic/Crash Reconstruction Team and Detective Division are investigating the crash. At this time, the operator has not faced any charges," said East Providence Police.

The East Providence Police Department would like to thank the public who called 911 and assisted on scene before first responders arrived. At this time, the operator's name is not being released.

Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University in 1955 and has served as a trustee there. While serving in the United States Air Force in Japan, he obtained a Master of Arts in history from Harvard University. After finishing his service, he obtained his Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1964 under Bernard Bailyn. His dissertation discussed the formation of distinctive political values and structures of thought in the late colonial era of British North America and became the basis for his 1969 book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787.

Early in his career, Wood taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan.[5] In 1969, he joined the faculty of Brown University where he was Professor of History and Alva O. Way University Professor.

Wood also taught at the College of William and Mary and from 1982 to 1983 was Pitt Professor at Cambridge University. In 2026, Professor Akhil Reed Amar, a friend and associate of Wood's, called him "America’s greatest living historian".

In addition to his books (listed below), Wood wrote numerous influential[how?] articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966), "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century" (1982), and "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution" (1987). He was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.

He wrote the third volume of the Oxford History of the United States – Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Contributing to the anthology Our American Story (2019), Wood addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative. He focused on the idea of equality as "the most radical and most powerful ideological force" that the American Revolution unleashed. "This powerful sense of equality is still alive and well in America, and despite all of its disturbing and unsettling consequences, it is what makes us one people." Wood was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988 and the American Philosophical Society in 1994.