Gordon S Wood: The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (2008, Penguin Press)

Wood is possibly the most eminent historian of the period of the American Revolution, at least since Bernard Bailyn, to whom this book is dedicated. He burst onto the scene in 1969 with his magisterial The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, promptly winning a Bancroft Prize. His second book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), had to settle for a Pulitzer Prize. Since 2000 he's been publishing more regularly, partly because the books have become narrower or at least easier. The American Revolution: A History is a short primer on the period. Revolutionary Characters is a collection of character studies, mostly gleaned from his numerous book reviews. This new book is also a collection of book reviews, these ones selected for lessons in historiograpy. I discovered rather early on that the fastest way to learn about history was not to tackle huge piles of grand books but to read around them: to scour through the acknowledgments and footnotes for hints about how working historians view each other, and where possible picking up reviews and interviews. I probably learned more about American history from John A. Garraty's Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians than any other single book. David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies was pure candy to me. Wood's new collection is another chance to get two-for-one: capsule summaries of more than a dozen books, plus the mediating framework of putting them into the context of contemporary historiography. Quite a deal.

In what follows, the chapter titles are in bold, followed by the reviewed books. The review dates are in brackets. A couple of reviews are followed by correspondence -- critiques of the reviews followed by Wood's replies. Each review is followed by a short afterword -- the latter all noted as [2008].