Gordon S. Wood, influential scholar

Pulitzer-winning Brown historian Gordon S. Wood died at 92 after police said a car struck him in an East Providence supermarket parking lot.

1. Frame 1After police said a car struck Gordon S. Wood and he died, his Pulitzer canon puts students' founding story under pressure.
2. Frame 2At Brown, Wood's books made the Revolution's social transformation a standard reference for how America explains itself.
3. Frame 3His 1993 Pulitzer-winning Radicalism argued independence remade American society, not just rule from Britain.
4. Frame 4Obama gave Wood a National Humanities Medal in 2011 for work on the founding and Constitution.
5. Frame 5Critics said that influential account minimized enslaved people, women, and Indigenous people in the founding story.
6. Frame 6The pressure now moves to syllabi, libraries, and historians deciding how much of Wood's frame survives.