The world today is witnessing domestic political turbulence on a scale not seen since the end of World War Two. Popular discontent, centered on basic issues of quality of life and personal freedom, has already produced revolutionary, if unfinished, change in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, and is having a major impact elsewhere in the Middle East (e.g. Syria, Bahrain). Beyond the Arab world, actual or potential revolutionary instability exists in outh Asia (e.g. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. South Sudan, Somalia), Latin America (e.g. Venezuela), and Europe (e.g. Serbia/Kosovo). America’s diplomats, from the earliest days of our country’s history, have been called upon to interpret such revolutionary events and develop or influence the U.S. response, from the Place de la Bastille to Tahrir Square.
Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He received his B.A. degree from Tufts University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He is the author of the Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004) was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different was published in 2006. The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History was published in 2008. His volume in the Oxford History of the United States, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (2009) was given the Association of American Publishers Award for History and Biography in 2009, the American History Book Prize by the New York Historical Society for 2010, and the Society of the Cincinnati History Prize in 2010. In 2011 he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama and the Churchill Bell by Colonial Williamsburg, In 2011 he also received the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, Award from the Society of American HIstorians, In 2012 he received an award from the John Carter Brown Library and the John. F. Kennedy Medal from the Massachusetts Historical Society. In 2015 he received the Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School. In 2015 he edited two volumes, The American Revolution:Writings from the Pamphlet Debate: 1764-1776, for the LIbrary of America. He reviews in the New York Review of Books. . He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
