Pulitzer-winning historian honored by Obama dies after car hits him in Rhode Island supermarket parking lot

Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author who was honored by former President Barack Obama at the White House, has died after he was hit by a car in a Rhode Island supermarket parking lot.

The 92-year-old from Concord, Massachusetts was struck in a Shaw's parking lot in East Providence on Sunday morning. Wood was taken to a hospital where he later died. East Providence police said the driver is cooperating with investigators and not facing any charges at this time.

Wood was a scholar on the American Revolution. Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011 for "for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution." He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his book "The Radicalism of the American Revolution."

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns told the Associated Press that Wood was a "teacher of generations of students and other historians."

Wood was a self-described "simple hedgehog" who stuck to writing about the revolution, which he regarded as "the most important event in American history, bar none." He was unhappy that students attending college knew far more about the Civil War, noting that it was impossible to understand any U.S. conflict without understanding the country's birth.

"We Americans have such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it," he once wrote.

Wood was a longtime professor at Brown University, joining the faculty at 1969. He earned his undergraduate degree at Tufts University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Wood's name also was familiar to moviegoers through the Academy Award-winning "Good Will Hunting," released in 1997. The lead character, a pugnacious, self-taught genius played by Matt Damon, taunts a Harvard undergraduate: "You're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization." (Ideas, Wood would point out, that he did not endorse).  

Associated Press writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.