Gordon S Wood is certainly among the most distinguished American historians studying the period of the Revolution and early years of the American republic. Pre-GoodReads, I read his Empire of Liberty in the Oxford History of the United States, a wonderful read and an intellectual tour de force.

This book is a reflection on the work of historians comprised of review articles appearing from 1981 to 2007, mostly in The New York Times Review of Books and in The New Republic. A fundamental thread running through these essays is “why do we study the past?” Wood’s contention is that the past needs to be understood on its own terms insofar as possible and not through the lens of present concerns. The reviews chronicle the “present concerns” of the last quarter century of historiography–critiquing such trends as “influence”, narrative, history as fiction, microhistory, history and political theory, postmodernism and history, race, class, gender, and multicultural concerns and history.

What I appreciate about these reviews is that they are neither a jeremiad against these trends in historiography nor an uncritical acceptance of the same. Rather, Wood welcomes the light these various approaches shed on the past and the richer understanding of the course of events that result but he firmly resists whatever he sees as distortions of the past driven by current agendas. For example, in his review of Theodore Draper’s A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution he affirms the more complex power dynamics of the revolution but also contends that ideas were important. He writes:

What is permissible culturally affects what is permissible socially or politically, so that even if ideas may not be motives for behavior, as the realists and materialists like Draper tell us, the do affect and control behavior.

He contends that all Draper can explain is the war of independence, but not the American Revolution.

Wood is not only a skilled historian, he is a skilled reviewer who summarizes the careers of the authors and the content of the books, and gives us his own careful and nuanced critique. He may not always please the authors he reviews but he always treats them with respect.