The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of Gordon S. Wood — Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University and the recipient of the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Obama in 2010 — and the work that secured his place alongside Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan as one of the three most consequential historians of early America of the twentieth century. The book won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Emerson Prize, and the New York Times Book Review called it the most important study of the American Revolution to appear in over twenty years and a landmark book. Wood's central argument is at once simple and revisionary: the American Revolution was far more radical than historians had appreciated — not merely a political separation from Britain but a wholesale transformation of social order, carrying the nation out of a hierarchical, monarchical, patron-client society built on deference and dependence into a democratic, egalitarian, commercial modernity whose emerging realities sometimes bewildered and disappointed the very founders who had set it in motion. The narrative is divided into three parts — Monarchy, Republicanism, and Democracy — tracing the arc of that transformation with a synthetic command of historical, political, cultural, and economic evidence that few American historians have matched. Together with The Creation of the American Republic (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize, the two volumes constitute the most ambitious and intellectually powerful account of the founding era produced by any American historian of Wood's generation.