Gordon Wood

Brown University

Gordon Wood is a professor of history emeritus at Brown University. He received his BA from Tufts University and his PhD from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969.

Wood is the author of many works, including The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (University of North Carolina, 1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize; The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993; The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (Penguin, 2004), which was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005, and Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Penguin Press, 2006). Wood served as a consultant to the National Constitution Center and to the U.S. Capitol renovation project and on the Board of Trustees for Colonial Williamsburg. He has lectured widely in the United States for students, teachers, and the general public.

Wood’s videos are used in the following Choices Program curriculum units:
The American Revolution: Experiences of Rebellion
We the People: A New Nation