2017 Gay Hart Gaines Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of American History

The Lasting Consequences of the American Revolution

Gordon S. Wood

The American Revolution is the most important event in American history, bar none; and it is one of the most important events in world history. In 1784 the English radical and Unitarian minister, Richard Price, went so far as to declare that the American Revolution, next to the introduction of Christianity, may prove to be “the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement” in all of history. Such a monumental event was bound to have immense consequences for Americans and for the world. This series of lectures explores three of these consequences: (1) the challenge that the Revolution’s declaration of republican equality posed for all traditional social hierarchies, (2) the transformation of the relationship between the private and the public realms in American society, and (3) the contribution of the Revolution to the origins of American capitalism.

About the Lecturer

Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He received his B.A. from Tufts University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He has also taught at the College of William and Mary and England’s Cambridge University, where he served as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions. Dr. Wood received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1993 for The Radicalism of the American Revolution. His book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama.