Gordon S Wood, Pulitzer-prize winning historian, dies after being struck by a car in Rhode Island | Rhode Island
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Gordon S Wood died after being hit by a car in a supermarket parking lot in Rhode Island on Sunday.
92-year-old Wood wins Pulitzer in 1993 The Radicalization of the American Revolution is a landmark book in the history category that develops the theory that the break with Britain was a social and political transformation at least as inherent as the desire for freedom from colonial masters.
According to East Providence police, the news outlet reported. golocalprov.comWood was hit by a car while crossing the supermarket car park. Police said the driver remained at the scene and was cooperative.
Wood was taken to a Rhode Island hospital with “serious injuries” and later died, police said.
Wood was the Alva O Way University Professor and professor emeritus of history. Brown University. Local media said he was the “leading Revolutionary period historian” for his “unparalleled” list of academic awards over the last half century.
His other prominent books include The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, written in 1969; Empire of Liberty, an account of the early years of the United States; and Revolutionary Characters, a biography of the founding fathers who shaped the new republic.
Other awards include 1970 Bancroft award For literature on American history; and the National Humanities Medal, presented by Barack Obama at the White House in March 2011, “for scholarship that informed the founding of the nation and the drafting of the U.S. constitution.”
His works “were recognized as reference points of intellectual and social historiography” that helped reshape America’s origin story in the years after World War II, according to a Washington Post obituary published Monday.
Wood was a leading critic of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times book 1619 Project and the later modified claim that perpetuating slavery was a key motivation for the American Revolution.
He claimed that the project encouraged a sense of “victimization” and “victimization”, although he admitted that he had not read most of it.
Another name that criticized this claim was Donald Trump. The president said in 2020 that the 1619 Project “distorted” America’s story and claimed that the United States was “founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom.”
Trump said American children should know that “they are citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”
Wood said the founders, including plantation owners Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, mistakenly believed that slavery would die a natural death and that the revolution energized the American abolitionist movement.
Slavery was not abolished in the United States until the ratification of the 13th amendment to the federal constitution in December 1865, following the Civil War.
Woods’ death was confirmed by his daughter. Amy Louise Woodhistorian at Illinois State University.
Associated Press contributed reporting
