The seminar room is small. An assembly of tables shaped into a U around the Professor. His hair is sandy blond with speckles of grey, his eye glasses rounded, and in his hands is a stack of books. His shoulder bearing an overflowing cross body leather bag nearly exploding with papers. This here is a historian.
Students file into their seats. Some are young. Age appropriate for an undergraduate seminar. Near the door sits a tattooed veteran, I would assume is in his 40s. We all pull out notebooks and computers, tablets and pencil cases. We nervously sit at attention as the Professor prepares to speak.
This is the class which will change the course of my life.
I’ve always been fascinated with early America. Perhaps I can point to American Girl doll books and Felicity’s determination to support the patriot cause. Maybe it was the patriotic sentiment and nationalist propaganda of the early 2000s. Or maybe I saw a trailer for John Adams. But the American Revolution and colonial American history caught my attention without any grant announcement or event. It became a part of my continuous and returning fascinations. The American Revolution is also why I quit my professional athletics career.
I was a lover of history throughout school but I wasn’t book smart. I once studied an entire week and prepared a 15 page study guide for a World History exam in high school and barely passed with a C. My papers were rubbish and my ability to perform on exams was abysmal. I wasn’t meant to be a good student. At least, that’s what my teachers and grades led me to believe.
I quit academics at 18. I had left high school and had no ambitions of pursuing higher education. I was going to ride and train horses. I “went pro” (meaning I was being paid to ride and compete) at 18 and didn’t look back. I spent 10 months out of the year on the road and only picked up a book on my off days (mondays) as a way to decompress. I kept coming back to historical fiction and studies of early America.
In 2015, while on a circuit of shows five weeks back to back I had an epiphany. The kind that shakes up the foundations of your belief system. I once believed that the only thing I could ever want, the only thing I needed to be happy, was horses. But I began to question whether that was true. I was pleased with my performance. I had a career without a degree. No debts. Yet, I would finish the day and crave more. More what? More knowledge. More depth. I was intellectually famished. So I enrolled at the Community College.
It was while preparing my transfer application that I fully embraced my fascination not just with the past but in early America. I read Joseph Ellis and David McCullough. I even picked up an entire edited edition of Thomas Jefferson and John Adam’s letters. I took notes on online lectures while staying in on Friday nights. I also learned just how black and white my conception of this period was.
I left my athletics career behind to pursue the study of history without any idea where the journey might lead. I considered a career in constitutional law. I agonized over whether to minor in Gender Studies or African American Studies. What would challenge me most? Which course would define my future?
I knew one thing though: I would study colonial American history and follow the path wherever it lead.
The first class I enrolled in was a seminar. A class led by Craig Yirush, a colonial American scholar whose course list included: Colonial America, The American Revolution, Arguing the Revolution, and the class I had enrolled on the Historiography of the American Revolution.
I had no clue what historiography was.
That first seminar introduced me to Charles Beard, Bernard Bailyn, Alan Taylor, Edmund Morgan, and of course Gordon S. Wood.
I learned that history was not just dates and people. It wasn’t even just stories shared across time. It was a practice, a method, and a debate.
We spent those three hours each week breaking down arguments, sources cited, methods of analysis. I learned what history really was. How historians shape the past. How their focal points in the archival record shape narratives and victors, antagonists and protagonists.
In reading the Radicalism of the American Revolution and comparing it to The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, I fell in love with the craft of history making. Of the research, the writing, the structure, and the passion these historians honed in order to deliver the past in the form of monographs to future generations.
It was a gift.
That seminar and the books assigned didn’t just shape what I learned as a student, they shaped me into a historian myself. They led me to question, to contemplate, to argue. They pushed me to think in a way I never had before and in it I found a piece of myself I never knew was missing. In offering up their work for public consumption, they enabled and encouraged the next generation of historians, of lawyers, of librarians, of data analysts, of economists, to embrace the past with nuance and skepticism, with passion and joy. Because the discovery of the past through the eyes and work of historians is important in ways which are intangible. They shape the way we think, the way we behave, the way we see not just the past but the present.
Today, the field of early American history lost a legend. Gordon S. Wood (author of the Radicalism of the American Revolution; Friends Divided; The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin; and more) died today in an accident caused by a distracted driver. He was 92 years old.
His legacy goes beyond the footnotes which will cite him for generations to follow. His legacy even goes beyond the students he taught and who have gone on to become leading historians, PhD advisors, and educators. His legacy even goes beyond his books and the research within them. His work touched countless scholars. He was a true historian who made historians.
To Gordon Wood, I am eternally grateful.
Rest in Peace, Professor.
Photo from the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum
This post has been graciously republished from the Substack “Archive of My Own”
