Gordon Stewart Wood was an American historian and academic who spent his career at Brown University. He was one of the most prominent scholars of American history, with particular expertise in the Revolutionary era and the early American republic. Wood's major works include The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, published in 1969, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1970. His later book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, published in 1992, earned him the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1993. These works established him as a leading interpreter of the American founding period. In recognition of his scholarly contributions, Wood was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2010. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1933.