Marybeth norton

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Box Rancho Mirage, CA Ph: info nortondesignapproach. Entry Foyers. Powder Rooms. Reflecting back on these years many decades later, she described them of consisting of herself, the library, her mentor Bernard Bailyn, and a few women in other areas of history. Recounting the difficulties of these years, Mary Beth credits Bailyn for offering her a path forward through intellectual engagement. In a male-dominated institution, one in which she often ran up against painful encounters with sexism, Bailyn treated her fairly.

Mary Beth had entered Harvard intending to work on 19th-century American intellectual history—to follow in the footsteps of her undergraduate mentor. Bailyn thus became her mentor and support system throughout graduate school and beyond.

Under his direction she shifted from James Otis to his opponents, who became loyalists during the revolution. On the way, she passed by a topic on Mercy Otis Warren due to a fear of being typed as a woman working on women—ironic in light of her later career and a pointed reflection on the times. Her graduate research on loyalists trained her in using the 18th-century correspondence that has been central to her career ever since. These themes have animated her work on the revolutionary era ever since.

Her research on loyalists also took her to London in the spring of , where she made many of the friendships that have endured throughout her professional career. Her passionate and dogged pursuit of her intellectual interests into the archives gave her the academic network that she had been missing at Harvard.

It also laid the groundwork for a stellar career. Mary Beth finished her PhD in and began a job as an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut that fall. The book that resulted, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, — , took a transatlantic approach long before the field of the Atlantic world had come into existence. Using the techniques of both social and intellectual history, Mary Beth determined that the loyalists came to realize how American they were only after they had abandoned America forever.

Praised for its richness of detail and its incisive yet balanced observations, the book established her as one of the leaders of a new generation of historians of the Revolution. Despite the victory of the prize-winning dissertation and the academic job, life as a female academic in the late s and early s remained challenging.

Indeed, the job market itself had taught her that already. At the December AHA annual meeting, when interviews were still arranged through word of mouth rather than by advertisements, she approached the chair of one department with a position in early American history and asked to submit her resume.

He refused to accept it. At the University of Connecticut, Mary Beth got her first real taste of teaching, learning how to structure lectures that could engage students in the US survey course.

The isolation of Storrs, Connecticut, proved difficult for her as a young single woman, but through a colleague at the university, Mary Beth became involved with the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. She found it exhilarating to be in a room with all female historians for the first time, and she became a steadfast supporter of the organization, known familiarly as the Berks.

She found herself troubled by what seemed to her to be common assumptions about women in the colonial period. Nonetheless, women did not yet emerge at the center of her own research; this would happen once she took up a new position at Cornell University, the school that would become her institutional home for many decades. Nevertheless, she joined the university as part of a small group of newly hired women in the College of Arts and Sciences.

As her first book, The British-Americans , entered the final stages of publication, she began to consider what she would do for her next major research project. She saw two possible paths forward. One was to consider the role of committees of correspondence and committees of safety in , a topic that had intrigued her during her research for her first book. Before long, she was hooked. She recalled that she had in fact encountered quite a few petitions for compensation from loyalist women to the British government after the Revolution.

By this point, Mary Beth was convinced that the notion of the colonial period as an ideal era for women was misguided. The impact of the book was far-reaching. By giving voice to women who had been shut out the historical record, Mary Beth created a vital emotional connection between readers and women of the 18th century. The verve and precision with which she crafted the book ensured that it would be accessible to an even wider audience than the generations of undergraduate and graduate students for whom it would be required reading.

That wider audience included teachers who incorporated her findings into their own classrooms and public history professionals who altered the presentation of the period to the public. The American Revolution had been forever changed. Together, the two books essentially created a new area of study out of whole cloth. Using distinct yet complementary approaches, Norton and Kerber together laid the groundwork for a generation of historians to begin asking further questions about women in early America.

Titled A People and a Nation , this survey of US history written by six authors would be the first to incorporate new social history approaches. The project also provided Mary Beth with the opportunity to insist on the incorporation of women into the presentation of every era of American history.

Published in , it quickly dominated the college market and later became adopted by the rapidly growing number of AP US history courses across the country. The textbook went through 10 editions with Mary Beth as a contributor she only recently stepped off the authorial board after more than 35 years. It was fitting that in Mary Beth was named to the Mary Donlon Alger chaired professorship in the History Department, an endowed chair for women on the Cornell Arts College faculty.

However, as she adjusted her chronological focus, she also expanded her perspective. In the end, she would come to define herself as a historian of gender, as well as a historian of women, just as the field as a whole made a similar transition. In Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society, Mary Beth shifted her gaze to the 17th century to consider the analogy between the family and the state.

While that analogy had been widely noted, Mary Beth felt that no one had truly considered the impact of that ideological link on the lives of women and men themselves. In particular, Mary Beth sought to reconsider the nature of authority in early colonial society, focusing on New England and Chesapeake colonies and using court records as her source base.

The answer, she determined, depended upon status. While some critics objected to her characterization of colonial society as being marked by two gendered systems of thought Filmerian in New England and proto-Lockean in the Chesapeake , the book established gender as a central component of authority as imagined and enacted in colonial British America.

With Founding Mothers and Fathers, Mary Beth completed the second of the three books that she now envisioned writing. Before beginning the final installment, which would span the gap between the 17th century and the revolutionary era, she realized that she would have to deal with one of the most written-about incidents in the history of women in early America, one that demanded its own separate treatment: the Salem witch trials.

It was a risky undertaking. A number of people discouraged Mary Beth from wading into the debates over what had occurred in Salem in After all, so much ink had already been spilled over this most famous episode in history of Puritan New England: friends and colleagues doubted aloud to her whether there could be anything new left to say.

But Mary Beth Norton has never been one to back away from a challenge, and she proceeded to immerse herself in the life of Essex County, Massachusetts, in the s.

Many will remember fondly the regular updates on her home answering machine in which she let callers know what had occurred in Salem that week in More than just amusing her callers, however, this chronological approach to unfolding events in and around Salem was key to her analysis.

Rather than focusing on one particular storyline or set of individuals, as many previous scholars had done, Mary Beth traced a detailed step-by-step account of the unfolding crisis, which made her newly aware of how certain incidents and actors had influence at particular moments. Having solved the Salem dilemma to her satisfaction, Mary Beth could at last turn back to her decades-long project of crafting the overall story of women in early British America.

The final book in her trilogy, Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World, grappled with the changes in ideologies of gender and the family lives of women and men between the end of the 17th century and the revolutionary period.

Looking for a bridge between the two very different eras, Mary Beth uncovered competing ways of understanding family that coexisted in the early 18th century.

Having reached the goal she set in the early s, Mary Beth has turned back to her very first love, the American Revolution.

But she is now applying the technique that she pioneered in her research on Salem, taking a deeply chronological approach to all of the events of In that role, she fought to make sure that women, especially those working at places other than large research institutions, received an adequate share of nominations—an issue she approached armed with the knowledge that women in the profession disproportionately held positions at these kinds of institutions.

Yet the work that she is proudest of has been in the classroom. Just as her research moved into new and uncharted territory when she arrived at Cornell, so too did the subjects that she taught to her undergraduates. The class attracted a diverse group of students, who appreciated what was at that time still a very novel and unusual approach.

By letting the topics that she has taught closely mirror her own research interests, she has been able to share with her students the enthusiasm that she feels as she, too, is learning about new subjects. While she was buried deep within the records of , for instance, she developed a sophomore-level research seminar on the Salem witchcraft trials and worked closely with an undergraduate research assistant on the compilation of her secondary source database.

Mary Beth has always found that the life of an historian to be full of excitement and opportunity, and in and beyond her classrooms she has worked to make that world visible and available to all those around her.

Indeed, the success of her Salem class provides a good example of the types of opportunities Mary Beth creates for her students. The best papers written in the seminar are posted on the website of the Cornell Witchcraft Collection, and some have been cited in recent books on the trials. It was in this context that Mary Beth and a colleague in astronomy, Steven Squyres, created a new co-taught lecture course.

Titled History of Exploration: Land, Sea, and Space, the course ranges from ancient mariners to the Mars rover, drawing crowds of students every year.

The class has proved so much fun that it has made it very difficult for Mary Beth to retire. Her continuing innovation and popularity in the classroom led to her being named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in , in recognition of distinguished undergraduate teaching.

As Mary Beth has worked tirelessly and with immense success to alter the narrative of the early American past to make it more inclusive, accurate, and complex, she has also cultivated rich communities of friends in all of the places she has lived.

Her enjoyment of music, her enthusiasm for cooking, her delight in mystery novels and swimming, all attest to her enormous love of life. She is not only an inquiring and astute scholar of the past, she is an ebullient, joyous explorer of the present. Her family and friends, like her students, have benefitted from this generous heart and mind, just as she has drawn so much from them over the course of her life thus far. When we look at Mary Beth and marvel at her many powers, we might surmise that her family background had a great deal to do with her strength of character.

She worked hard to forge a path for herself and her forward momentum has carried her and the field forward, generating an army of Mary Beth Norton loyalists along the way.