Gordon Wood was the single greatest shaper and transmitter of the wild intentions of our founding fathers since the founders themselves. Along with his colleague and friendly rival Bernard Bailyn at Harvard, Wood did more to educate us about who we are as Americans — a self-made people — than the current faculties of every university in America. It is sad to think that neither Wood nor Bailyn would remotely be considered for tenure today at the universities where they taught for decades. Not just because they were “straight white men” but because their writing conveyed complex and original ideas in clear prose that was written to inflame the imagination of any interested reader. Sadly, that kind of broad sympathy, rooted in centuries of historical story-telling and decades of original research and thinking, is foreign to the cultish and tendentious way that today’s historians are taught to think and write. We are all poorer for it.