How Gordon S. Wood Shaped the Idea of America (opens in new tab)

He never expected to become famous and certainly never admitted to wanting to be famous. He’d studied men like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who had sought fame and described its strange, arbitrary workings. But by the time Matt Damon name-checked Gordon S. Wood on “the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization” Good Will Hunting, Wood had long since become a lightning rod for his fellow historians and the much greater number of others who drafted t...