Life
Norton was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan and her Master of Arts (1965) and Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard University. Her doctoral dissertation, The British-Americans, was published by Little, Brown and Company and won the 1970 Allan Nevins Prize.
Her book Founding Mothers and Fathers (1996) was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. She was co-editor, To Toil the Livelong Day (1987), Women of America (1979), Major Problems in American Women's History (4th ed., 2007), and In the Devil's Snare (2002) about the Salem witch trials. She is also noted as one of the authors of the two-volume A People & A Nation, an American history textbook, currently in its eighth edition. Articles written by Norton have been published in William and Mary Quarterly, Signs, and the American Historical Review.
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 also served as the general editor of the AHA Guide to Historical Literature in 1995. Norton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. 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.
Norton appears in a variety of history programs and documentaries about colonial times, including Salem Witch Trials in the Discovery Channel's Unsolved History series in 2003 and in Witch Hunt on the 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 appears in Salem Witch Hunt: Examine the Evidence in 2011 for the Essex National Heritage Commission and the National Park Service
Read more about this topic: Mary Beth Norton
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