"All That Gordon Wood Business!"

"His work has made a difference in one more way. It reinforced the center when it was under heavy attack from both extremes. In a gentle reproof to scholars on the left, Wood has offered evidence that 'what is extraordinary about the American Revolution is not . . . the continual deprivation and repression of the mass of ordinary people, but rather their release and liberation.' To conservatives on the right he makes very clear that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were conceived by their framers in dynamic terms, and were intended to grow."

David Hackett Fischer in The New York Times reviews Gordon S. Wood's The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States.