One of the great threats to American thriving is the destruction of our historical sense. While we are a pragmatic people, our ability to navigate the future requires us to understand the past. Thus, it is with deep sadness that Americans who value the preservation of our history were informed of the deaths of three great scholars who contributed to the American mind by laying out the past in ways both vivid and enlightening.
The Chronicler of the Down-and-Out with Dignity
The first death was of a scholar whose work contributed to the understanding of our immediate past and present by working to present people as they were rather than according to the ideological needs of the moment. Robert Coles, a Harvard professor who died on June 4, 2026, at the age of 97, often described himself variously as “a doctor, child psychiatrist, wanderer, oral historian, social anthropologist, teacher, friend, storyteller, busybody, nuisance and ‘idiosyncratic oddball.’”
A Boston-bred Harvard student who was passionate about literature but decided to go to medical school on the recommendation of the New Jersey poet-physician William Carlos Williams, Coles decided to focus on psychiatry after discovering his discomfort at using needles on children.
While serving in the Air Force in the late 1950s in Biloxi, Mississippi, Coles saw first-hand the biting injustice of segregation. What turned his attention to children was a 1960 trip to New Orleans. There, he observed the drama of Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old black girl who had to run a gauntlet of angry pro-segregationists as she made her way (with law enforcement protection) to school in a formerly segregated elementary school.
Coles was fascinated by Bridges’s perseverance and even dedication to prayer for those persecuting her. Coles decided that he needed to observe other children in similar situations. The result was a five-volume study titled Children of Crisis that came from building intensive relationships with all sorts of children. He listened to what they said and paid attention to what they wrote and drew.
This broad, humanistic approach revealed problems in the modern welfare state and helped people imagine victims of persecution as fully-fleshed human persons. It also won him two Pulitzer Prizes.
Coles showed Americans aspects of the dark side of their history. He also showed them what remained beautiful and strong even in the midst of tragedy.
The Historian of Christian Beginnings and Christian Liberty
Robert Louis Wilken may have been less-well-known than Coles, but his work was no less important. The William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity emeritus at the University of Virginia spent a lifetime illuminating the early church by showing not only its doctrine but its way of life. Wilken passed away on June 7, 2026.
Born in New Orleans in 1936, Wilken was raised in a devout Lutheran home and eventually became an ordained minister. A fellow student of Richard John Neuhaus at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, he did doctoral work at the University of Chicago, where he studied with legendary church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, who later said “Wilken was the best student I mentored.” Like Neuhaus, he later entered the Catholic Church.
During his career at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Fordham, Notre Dame, and, finally, the University of Virginia, Wilken wrote many great books and essays that have become minor classics. His 1984 The Christians as the Romans Saw Them opened up what we could learn about early Christians from the vantage point of their pagan critics. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (2003) looked from the inside of the Christian world at how giants such as Augustine not only taught but acted. He painted with his broadest brush in The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (2012).
Wilken also examined the past specifically with an eye to questions that were on the table. His 2010 book Christianity Face to Face with Islam looked at how Christians had approached Muslims in the past in order to determine a faithful way of doing so in the present. His 2019 Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom demonstrated that the tradition of religious freedom arose from Christian examples and premises.
Wilken was known for his razor-sharp intellect, his tough approach to arguments, and his eminently humane love of food, music, culture, and baseball. He was also known for prayer. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas remembered him as one who “knew that the intellectual life of the Christian theologian required prayer that was continuous and woven throughout the everyday.”
Interpreter of the American Founding
Dying on the same day as Wilken was Gordon Wood, the Brown University scholar whose work was said to have revolutionized American thought about our beginnings. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize for history, and the National Humanities Medal, Wood briefly became famous when Matt Damon’s character in the film Good Will Hunting mentioned the scholar in a dramatic scene. Wood good-naturedly admitted in an interview: “That’s my two seconds of fame! More kids know about that than any of the books I have written.”
Yet Wood’s popular legacy will extend beyond a movie clip. An honest historian who advocated dealing fairly with the good and bad of America’s early history, he nevertheless refused to tolerate ideologically-driven pseudo-history intended to make Americans hate their country.
Wood was beloved by both sides of the American political spectrum. Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal, while he received frequent accolades from Newt Gingrich.
In his later years, Wood was one of the stalwart opponents of the 1619 Project, the New York Times-backed endeavor to recast America’s founding story as one of slavery and racism.
This opposition was not cooked up on the spot. Historian David Hackett Fischer reviewed Wood’s 2010 book, The Idea of America, concluding: “Always, Wood’s purpose was not to celebrate or condemn these leaders, but to understand them. His results lead us beyond the hagiographers who celebrate the founders as demigods, and iconoclasts who revile them as racists and sexists, an approach Wood believes to be inaccurate and anachronistic.”
Indeed, Wood saw that, even if one could find unmixedly good or bad intentions, history showed us something else: “I think it teaches one big lesson, which I would equate with wisdom – that things don’t quite work out the way one intends, and that you have to be willing to accept the limitations of life.”
This independence of mind was probably partly due to his method. His former student Bradley Thompson recalled Wood’s advice to “think big,” not getting caught up in minor aspects of a story, and not letting the work of other scholars interfere with one’s real interaction with the evidence.
When Wood looked at the evidence, he did not see the 1619 Project’s understanding of slavery and racism at America’s heart. Instead, he saw a powerful and revolutionary understanding of equality among the Americans, an emphasis derived from their British cultural background. It was this sense of equality that he thought provided a way for Americans to celebrate a common story.
What National Constitution Center Interim President Vince Stango said of Gordon Wood is a fitting tribute to all three of these recently deceased scholars: “History was not simply a record of what happened, but an invitation to grapple with enduring questions about citizenship, freedom, power, and the responsibilities of democratic self-government.”
As Professor Wilken’s beloved St. Augustine once observed, we can be buried in the darkness and guilt of our memory. But we do not have to. We study history both to know the past and to know how we might respond in our own times—perhaps better than before—to the challenges we face as humans, as Americans, and as Christians.
May these scholars who kept and sharpened our memory rest in peace. And may their memory be a blessing for us who wish to remember and learn.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.
But their detailed lives are still preserved in books which it is our soul and complete responsibility to preserve these documents from the flame and the slanderous tongue.
Their books are incomparable. I enjoyed every page of every book authored by these folks, and I by NO means have read them all. Still working on it, though. =]
This article is one of the reasons I subscribed to this newsletter information like this. Thank you.
I know I’m missing out on never having read these great American’s books or appreciated their work. I especially appreciated Coles account of little six year old, Ruby Bridges in her strength in a trying and dark time of our history. This little one could teach all of us!