An Evening with Gordon Wood

Gordon S. Wood

Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University, and is one of the most well-known and widely read historians of the nation’s founding. 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. President Obama awarded Dr. Wood the National Humanities Medal in 2010. 

Power and Liberty

The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. During these decades, Americans explored and debated all aspects of politics and constitutionalism--the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights, the division of authority between different spheres of government, sovereignty, judicial authority, and written constitutions. The results of these issues produced institutions that have lasted for over two centuries.

In this new book, eminent historian Gordon S. Wood distills a lifetime of work on constitutional innovations during the Revolutionary era. In concise form, he illuminates critical events in the nation's founding, ranging from the imperial debate that led to the Declaration of Independence to the revolutionary state constitution making in 1776 and the creation of the Federal Constitution in 1787. Among other topics, he discusses slavery and constitutionalism, the emergence of the judiciary as one of the major tripartite institutions of government, the demarcation between public and private, and the formation of states' rights.