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Gordon Wood And The American Revolution Summary

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After reading the work of Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution, it is clear that the origins of the American Revolution and the debate over its interpretation has led well into the late 1900s despite a period gap of over 200 years. Each work independently exemplifies one of the broadly debated theories for the events leading and corresponding with the American revolution, ideas that the American Revolution was a result of a political and intellectual movement or a genuine event based on the changing view in the eighteenth century.
Bailyn’s work, which published almost 25 years before the work of Wood, is an intellectual history which uses the medium of political pamphlets to provide details and argue his ideology as the American Revolution being mainly a political and intellectual movement as the result of the colonial defense against Britain to defend what became the ideals and principles of Americans in the late eighteenth-century. For Bailyn, one of the fundamental attributes which set the American Revolution into motion was the constant conflict of Power vs. Liberty, stating in his thesis “the American …show more content…

However, for Wood it was not the power that the British monarchy placed over the American colonies, but the transition that Americans faced as they moved from the governing system of a monarchy to a republic then later to a democracy, all which lead to the change in ideals of the American in the eighteenth century. Wood placed emphasis on this by stating “Living in a society that was already diverse and pluralistic, Americans realized that these attachments could not be traditional ethic, religious and tribal loyalties to the Old World. Instead, they sought new enlightened connections to hold their new popular societies

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Gordon S. Wood, “the preeminent historian of the Revolution”, is a well known American historian who has received several awards such as the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize for his historical books. In his book, The American Revolution: A History, he breaks down the key events based on his experiences and knowledge on the Revolutionary period. Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts on November 27,1933. Wood teaches at many liberal renowned universities such as Brown, Cambridge, Northwestern , and Harvard. Now being eighty one years old, he recently retired from Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

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