Michael Barone

The sudden death of the historian Gordon Wood, just weeks before the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, is one more mark of the closure of a golden age of the historiography of the Revolutionary era. It’s an occasion to reflect on the uniqueness, indeed the idiosyncrasy, of the emergence of the primacy of this United States among the nations of the world.

As the historian Walter McDougall has pointed out, a catalog of world civilizations in the year 1600 looks, with one exception, much like the world today. There is a prosperous and populous China at one end of Eurasia and a prosperous and populous Europe at the other. There is a bustling Indian subcontinent and a vast and little-visited Africa, and large Euro-indigenous cultures in Mexico and South America.

The great difference is the emergence, from what was a sparsely populated and isolated realm, of the great world power of the United States of America.

How this nation emerged, and how it was formed and unified in the pivotal final years of the 18th century, has come to be understood anew thanks to a generation of historians who began their work in the postwar decades more than 50 years ago and continued it into their 90s. Among the pioneers were Wood, who died this week at 92, and his thesis adviser Bernard Bailyn, who died in 2020 at 97.

Before their generation, American historiography often was more about the presumptions of the writers than the makers of history. Early 19th-century historians glorified, even mythologized, the Founding Fathers. The tragic losses of the Civil War prompted Northerners to lament antebellum statesmen’s failure to compromise and Southerners to canonize the champions of the Lost Cause.

Early 20th-century progressives, influenced by Marxist assumptions about economic class warfare, tried to prove that colonists led a revolution against Britain and then wrote a constitution all to protect their wealth against redistribution. Then, in what I have called the “Midcentury Moment” during and after World War II, some historians abjured class warfare and argued that Americans shared a consensus all along.

Bailyn and Wood did something else. They read the patriots’ words more carefully and took their arguments seriously. They studied the numerous pamphlets from the revolutionary 1760s and 1770s, as well as the debates over the new republic in the 1780s and 1790s.

They understood that Americans, imbued with British ideas of freedom but blessedly distant from British authorities, could write with more frankness than past political theorists under the close supervision of monarch and church, and with no motive to conceal motivation from the then-nonexistent Marxian or Freudian theorists. They did the real work of history: understanding a society familiar in some respects but strange in so many others.

We are unlikely to hear much more from the last survivors of the two generations of academic and popular historians who made the final third of the 20th century a golden age for the history of the founding. In the universities, most have been replaced by academics with different interests and a more adversarial approach to the nation whose bounty and freedoms make their work possible.

But on the 251st Fourth of July upcoming, and in months and years to come, it should be refreshing to dip into their rich works and gain more knowledge of, and appreciation for, the wondrous deeds of those who came before us and of whom we are the fortunate, if too often the ungrateful, heirs.