Mary Beth Norton

Mary Beth Norton (born 1943) is an American historian, specializing in American colonial history and well known for her work on women's history and the Salem witch trials. She is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emeritus of American History at the Department of History at Cornell University. The first woman to join the department of history at Cornell University, Norton is a pioneer of women historians not only in the United States but also in the world.

Norton received her Bachelor of Arts (B. A.) at the University of Michigan (1964). The next year she completed a Master of Arts (M. A.), going on to receive her Ph.D. in 1969 at Harvard University. Norton served as president of the American Historical Association in 2018. She is a recipient of the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies for In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. She identifies as a Democrat and she considers herself a Methodist.

Biography Mary Beth Norton was born on March 25, 1943, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her father, Clark Frederic Norton, was a political science professor, a legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, and an employee of the Congressional Research Service. Her mother, Mary Norton (her maiden name was Lunny), was also a professor. Her parents played a special role when encouraging her to study. In 1948, they left Ann Arbor and moved to Greencastle, a city in Indiana where both parents taught at DePauw University. Her father was a political science professor, and her mother taught Latin. She and her family were very tied to the academic year and to DePauw.

Subsequently, she was offered a job at the University of Connecticut as an assistant professor of history, a turning point in her career. She spent two years there and got to know Tom Paterson, with whom she would later coauthor a new U.S. history textbook, After learning of the Nevins prize, and reading Norton ́s Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University (New York) offered her a job as an assistant professor of history, becoming the first woman in Cornell ́s history department. and in Witch Hunt on the History Channel in 2004. She was interviewed in 2008 for the PBS Series History Detectives, on Season 6, Episode 7, "Front Street Blockhouse.". She appeared in Salem Witch Hunt: Examine the Evidence in 2011 for the Essex National Heritage Commission and the National Park Service She made an appearance in the very first episode of the American version of Who Do You Think You Are?, helping Sarah Jessica Parker trace her Massachusetts ancestry, which involved the Salem witch trials. She also appeared, with historian Margo Burns, in Season 8 (2016) of the TLC genealogy show, speaking with actor Scott Foley about his ancestor, Samuel Wardwell, who was executed for witchcraft during the trials in 1692.

Memberships and positions in organizations Norton has served on the National Council on the Humanities, as president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and as vice president for research of the American Historical Association. She was also elected Speaker of the third Cornell University Senate. Norton has won grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

She has also been a member of the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the Conference Group on Women's History, the Coordinating Committee of Women in the Historical Profession, the Phi Beta Kappa, the Mortar Board and the Phi Kappa Phi.

Norton was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2010.

Works

The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1972. (Editor, with Carol Berkin) Women of America: A History, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1979. (Coauthor) A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1982, 6th revised edition, 2001, 6th brief edition, 2003. (Editor, with Carol Groneman) "To Toil the Livelong Day": America's Women at Work, 1780-1980, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1987. (Editor, with Ruth M. Alexander) Major Problems in American Women's History: Documents and Essays, D. C. Heath (Lexington, MA), 1989, 3rd revised edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2003. (Editor, with Pamela Gerardi) The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature, 3rd revised edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

1774: The Long Year of Revolution (2020) online review by Gordon S. Wood Contributor to Women in the Age of the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert, 1989; The Transformation of Early American History, edited by James Henretta, and others, 1991; and Learning History in America, edited by Lloyd Kramer, and others, 1994. Also contributor to History Today, William and Mary Quarterly, Signs, and many other journals.

Awards and honors Woodrow Wilson fellowship, 1964–65 Allan Nevins Prize of Society of American Historians for best doctoral dissertation in American history, 1969 National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Humanists fellowship, 1974–75 Charles Warren Center fellowship, Harvard University, 1974–75 Shelby Cullom Davis Center fellowship, Princeton University, 1977–78 Berkshire prize for Best Book, Woman Historian for Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800, 1980 Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 1986–87 Society for Humanities fellow, Cornell University, 1989–90 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow, 1993-94