Mary beth norton cornell history

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. Norton, Mary Beth. Interview by Claudine Barnes. Interview by Ben Barker-Benfield. Interviews by Ann Little on www.

Press, ; paperback, Knopf, ; Vintage paperback, Oxford Univ. Press, DC Heath, ; 2d ed. I to and Vol. II since Houghton Mifflin, 1st ed. Presidential Address. Perspectives Columns. Corey Prize Raymond J. Cunningham Prize John H. Klein Prize Waldo G. Marraro Prize George L. Mosse Prize John E. Palmegiano Prize James A. Schmitt Grant J. Beveridge Award Recipients Albert J. Corey Prize Recipients Raymond J. Cunningham Prize Recipients John H.

Fagg Prize Recipients John K. Franklin Jameson Award Recipients J. Marraro Prize Recipients George L. Palmegiano Prize Recipients James A. Early Constraints and Exploration Mary Beth Norton was born into a family with a deep appreciation for history and for education more generally.

Addressing such questions, commentators often lament the loss of propriety that prevailed early in this century, when more families were intact, more morals adhered to. But rarely do they frame today's social ills in the context of centuries past. That may change, thanks to a new book from a Cornell University historian.

An engrossing mix of political philosophy and social history, the book was published this spring and has been named a summer selection by the Book-of-the-Month-Club and the History Book Club. A reviewer in The New York Times writes, "To follow [Norton's] lead is to travel at high speed -- and ground level -- through a broad, colorful and richly variegated historical landscape.

It makes, all in all, for an unusually engrossing ride. For more than a decade, Norton analyzed transcripts from almost 10, civil and criminal cases from the courts of colonial New England and the Chesapeake Virginia and Maryland between and The transcripts introduced Norton to a colorful cast of characters whose unseemly actions landed them in court.

She, in turn, introduces them to readers with lively, often humorous anecdotes as she explores the links among 17th-century families, communities and politics. The dominant view of the colonists, writes Norton, was that the family and state were inherently similar; government was modeled after the family.

A stable society required stable families, and familial disruptions threatened social order. Therefore, family life was of paramount concern to colonial leaders; there was no discussion, as today, of a separation of private and public. That foundation was inherently authoritarian and patriarchal, inspired by the writings of English political theorist Robert Filmer, who viewed the family as a "little monarchy.

But, as the book's title suggests, colonial women were not powerless; the 'founding mothers' played an important, if seldom acknowledged, role in family and community life. Women who wielded power in their own homes, as mothers or as supervisors of servants, for example, were more likely to hold sway in the community in such positions as midwives.

Encountering in her research many more strong women in New England than in the Chesapeake, Norton surmised that demographics played a major role in the divergent status of women living in the regions. She writes that very few women lived in the Chesapeake during the period; the area was populated almost solely by men, brought in to work the tobacco fields. Chesapeake households were more likely to be populated by groups of men than by married couples. As a result, Norton believes, women had little presence or power within or without the home, and Chesapeake communities tended to be modeled on contractual relationships among groups of men rather than on the traditional family unit.