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Response
Wood, Gordon S.
Wood, Gordon S.
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Abstract
How does one respond to such kind and generous comments? I am overwhelmed by them, and it is hard to know what to say in response, especially since each of the disciplines represented---history, law, and political theory---see the same past so differently.
But before saying anything I must thank all the participants for taking the time and effort to attend the conference and prepare their remarks. Of course, I am especially grateful to Akhil Amar and Steven Calabrese for creating and organizing the conference, inviting and corresponding with all the participants, and ensuring that everything went smoothly. All of us who were there are indebted to the Law School of Yale University for hosting our gathering.
I realize I was fortunate to have completed the bulk of my career as an historian before DEI and the search for social justice came to dominate much of academic life. Nowadays the oppressors in the Revolution are no longer the British; instead, the tyrants have become white patriarchal males who care for no one but themselves. And the oppressed are not the Patriots, but women, blacks, and the native peoples. Today the academic culture is so morally soaked with social justice that young scholars trying to write the kind of history I wrote would likely be intimidated and pressured into focusing on subjects having to do with women, race, slavery, or the indigenous peoples.
The traditional kind of twentieth-century scholarship on the Revolution produced by such scholars as Charles McLean Andrews, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Edmund S. Morgan, and Bernard Bailyn is gone, and today it is hard to imagine it ever being revived, at least not in the near future. Perhaps to have the kind of histories of the Revolution that we were once used to, histories that were mostly free from anachronism and the presentist need to indict the past for not sharing our present moral values, we will have to count on historians in law schools or public institutions such as Akhil Amar and Jeffrey Rosen or popular historians with no academic connection such as Ron Chernow and Rick Atkinson.