The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787.

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969) is the foundational work of Gordon S. Wood — Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University and recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History — and one of the most important works of American historical scholarship produced in the twentieth century. During the Revolutionary era, American political theory underwent a fundamental transformation that carried the nation out of a basically classical and medieval world of political discussion into a milieu that was recognizably modern, and it is precisely this transformation — from the Declaration of Independence through the ratification of the Constitution — that Wood traces with extraordinary intellectual rigor and documentary command. The book received the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times Book Review called it one of the half dozen most important books ever written about the American Revolution — a judgment the William and Mary Quarterly seconded by declaring that during the nearly two decades since its publication, the book had set the pace, furnished benchmarks, and afforded targets for many subsequent studies, and that if ever a work of history merited the appellation "modern classic," this was surely one.