Brown University scholar to tell what made the founders different

"Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different?" is the title of the 2007 Kuroda Lecture at Skidmore College, to be given Friday, April 20, by Gordon S. Wood, an award-winning historian at Brown University.

Free and open to the public, the lecture gets under way at 8 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.  Skidmore’s departments of government, history, and American studies are co-sponsors of the event.

Wood, the Alva O. Way University Professor at Brown, will draw on research done for his most recent book, which has the same name as the lecture and will be published this spring by Penguin.  His earlier books include The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. His most recent publication is The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, which was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005. He is working on a volume in the Oxford History of the United States, dealing with the period of the early Republic from 1789 to 1815.

He also contributes regularly to The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

Wood received a B.A. degree from Tufts University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

The College's Tad Kuroda Lecture is part of a weekend symposium that honors Kuroda, a longtime member of the History Department, who retired in 2005. One of Skidmore's most popular and respected professors, Kuroda earned degrees at Yale and Columbia before joining the Skidmore faculty in 1969. A specialist in American history, Kuroda is an expert on the Electoral College, which was the topic of his 1991 Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture. Selection as the Moseley Lecturer is the highest honor that the Skidmore faculty may bestow upon a colleague