Gordon S. Wood, 92, dies after being hit by a car

Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose influential and debated works on the American Revolution and the early republic shaped generations of scholarship, died on June 7, 2026. He was 92. According to authorities in East Providence, Rhode Island, Wood died from injuries sustained after being struck by a vehicle in a supermarket parking lot earlier that day.

Wood was a professor emeritus at Brown University and the author of dozens of books and essays that became standard references for understanding the nation's founding. His first major work, The Creation of the American Republic, won the Bancroft Prize in 1970. He later received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1993 for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a book that argued the revolution precipitated a profound social and cultural transformation, creating a new democratic society. Another work, Empire of Liberty, was a Pulitzer finalist in 2009. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded him a National Humanities Medal for his insights into the nation's founding.

While widely respected, Wood's narrative was also sharply debated. Many peers regarded him as the embodiment of the traditional, fact-guided...