Bio
Gordon Wood
Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969.
Wood is the author of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 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. His latest books are Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History and Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.
Wood reviews in The New York Review of Books and The New Republic and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He received his bachelor's degree from Tufts University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Wood previously lectured at Chautauqua in 2009, in a week on "The History of Liberty."
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- American Civil War
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendering to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court …The Granger Collection, New York(1861–65) Conflict between the U.S. federal government and 11 Southern states that fought to secede from the Union. It arose out of disputes over the issues of slavery, trade and tariffs, and the doctrine of states' rights. In the 1840s and '50s, Northern opposition to slavery in the Western territories caused the Southern states to fear that existing slaveholdings, which formed the economic base of the South, were also in danger. By the 1850s abolitionism was growing in the North, and when the antislavery Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the Southern states seceded to protect what they saw as their right to keep slaves. They were organized as the Confederate States of America under Jefferson Davis. The Northern states of the federal Union, under Lincoln, commanded more than twice the population of the Confederacy and held greater advantages in manufacturing and transportation capacity. The war began in Charleston, S.C., when Confederate artillery fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Both sides quickly raised armies. In July 1861, 30,000 Union troops marched toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, Va., but were stopped by Confederate forces in the Battle of Bull Run and forced to retreat to Washington, D.C. The defeat shocked the Union, which called for 500,000 more recruits. The war's first major campaign began in February 1862, when Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant captured Confederate forts in western Tennessee. Union victories at the battles of Shiloh and New Orleans followed. In the East, Robert E. Lee won several Confederate victories in the Seven Days' Battles and, after defeat at the Battle of Antietam, in the Battle of Fredericksburg (December 1862). After the Confederate victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Lee invaded the North and engaged Union forces under George Meade at the momentous Battle of Gettysburg. The war's turning point in the West occurred in July 1863 with Grant's success in the Vicksburg Campaign, which brought the entire Mississippi River under Union control. Grant's command was expanded after the Union defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga, and in March 1864 Lincoln gave him supreme command of the Union armies. He began a strategy of attrition and, despite heavy Union casualties at the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, began to surround Lee's troops in Petersburg, Va. (see Petersburg Campaign). Meanwhile William T. Sherman captured Atlanta in September (see Atlanta Campaign), set out on a destructive march through Georgia, and soon captured Savannah. Grant captured Richmond on April 3, 1865, and accepted Lee's surrender on April 9 at Appomattox Court House. On April 26 Sherman received the surrender of Joseph Johnston, thereby ending the war. The mortality rates of the war were staggering—there were about 620,000 deaths out of a total of 2.4 million soldiers. The South was devastated. But the Union was preserved, and slavery was abolished.
- American Civil War on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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