“To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”

Allen Guelzo, historian of the American Civil War, comments on what was lost when Gordon Wood was killed. Wood was one of the most influential historians of the American Revolution. He died in a grocery store parking lot accident at 92. Guelzo on Wood:

...Wood made me understand how thoroughly stuck in the antique ways of pre-modern European society Americans were on the eve of 1776, a world in which slavery was treated with a shrug of the shoulders as just one more practice of servitude, and where commerce functioned within webs of patronage, not customers. The Revolution, Wood explained, constituted a sharp and decisive break with that world. Servitude disappears in America and slavery becomes an aberration that demands either bizarre excuses or unprecedented denunciation. Gentleman is no longer a rank for those who do not work with their hands, but merely a description of polite behavior; honor shrinks as a symbol of importance, and business becomes dominated by the mobility and impersonality of banks and paper money. With a jolt, it becomes clear how, in the span of a single generation, Americans become the people who Tocqueville admired and who elected Lincoln as president.

Wood’s trademarks were his strict attention to written sources, and his relative indifference to social, cultural, and ethnic history. .... When Creation was published in 1969, Wood was considered avant-garde because his revolutionaries seemed to pay no attention to the restrained and lofty political models of Greece and Rome. But he would remain just as resistant to the import of more recent ideological fashions into history writing, and especially the attempt to convert historical process into broad binary categories of oppressed/oppressor or settler/indigenous. In 2019, he broke with a large community of historians when he expressed his skepticism toward the 1619 Project’s proposal that slavery was the dominant fact of American life and that the Revolution was a device for protecting it. In Wood’s eyes, this was absurd. The 1619 Project might be pardoned as an example of over-wrought journalism, but it should not be mistaken for sober-sided history-writing, and it was important for the life a nation for historians to say so. “We all want justice,” he wrote, “but not at the expense of truth.” ....

As fully as he repudiated the 1619 Project, he also repudiated the more recent nonsense which insists that there is an American “heritage” conferred by ancestry from the Mayflower or Valley Forge. “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” he wrote in one of his last essays. To the contrary, it was the Revolutionary state and its fiery and universalistic Declaration of Independence which made the American nation. “To be an American is not to be someone,” he wrote, “but to believe in something.”

Gordon Wood understood that historians are the memory system of a democracy. Because the American democracy has been organized around a set of propositions which have political meaning, it is vital to understand where that political meaning came from, and that is the task of the historian. .... (more)

Allen C. Guelzo, "In Memoriam, Gordon S. Wood," National Review, June 10. 2026.