Monday, January 22, 2007

A New Gordon Wood Book?

In a recent post at Civil War Bookshelf discussing an article about the Oxford University Press American history series, Dimitri Rotov missed the most important point: Gordon Wood may be close to finishing another book!

"Writing long, comprehensive, narrative histories carries little prestige within the academy these days, and this too seems to have had something to do with the delays. 'The idea that you can sum up the scholarship of a previous generation in one volume just doesn't hold anymore,' says Gordon Wood, a Brown historian who doesn't quite share that view. Wood has been working for a decade, off and on, on a book for the series, on the period 1789 to 1815. He says the end is in sight.

"It may finally be. Susan Ferber, the Oxford editor, says the project has picked up some fresh momentum recently. She has three manuscripts on her desk [including] chapters from Wood . . .."

This may be old news to members of the academy tied in to the scholarly grapevine, but not to me.

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