![]() The book is a collection of articles and lectures that Wood, the Alva O. ![]() His purpose is nothing less than to make sense of the United States and its place in the world. “The fox knows many things,” the poet wrote, “but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Between those choices, Wood says he is a “simple hedgehog” since all of his publications “have dealt with the American Revolution and its consequences.” There is, however, nothing simple and not much hedgehog-like about his capacious interpretation of the Revolution, which he insists “is the most important event in American History, bar none.” In explicating the roots as well as the consequences of that subject, he reaches back to the history of Rome and of 17th-century England as well as to colonial America, and moves forward to contemporary American foreign policy. ![]() ![]() At the beginning of The Idea of America, Gordon Wood refers to a now familiar distinction in intellectual styles that Isaiah Berlin drew from the Greek poet Archilochus. ![]()
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