Read the Revolution
Read the Revolution with Mary Beth Norton
June 2023
Author and historian Dr. Mary Beth Norton joined the Museum on June 6, 2023, for a special presentation titled, “Gender and American Resistance to British Authority, 1765-1775: A Reassessment,” as part of the Museum's Read the Revolution Speaker Series. Drawing on her award-winning books, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution and Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800, Norton reflected on the advances in scholarship on gender and the Revolution that have appeared since Liberty’s Daughters was first published in 1980, based on her own additional research and that of other historians. She also dealt with questions about men’s and women’s involvement in pre-revolutionary politics in the context of contemporary definitions of masculinity and femininity.
The program was held in the Museum’s Liberty Hall. Following the presentation, Museum President & CEO Dr. R. Scott Stephenson joined the conversation to facilitate a live Q&A with the onsite and online audiences.
About Dr. Mary Beth Norton
Mary Beth Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History Emerita at Cornell University, where she taught from 1971 to 2018. In 2005-6, she was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge. She has written six books about Early American history, including Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800; and In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. She was an author, with others, of A People and A Nation, which appeared in its 11th edition in 2018, one of the leading U.S. history textbooks since its initial publication in 1982. Her most recent work is 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (2020), which won the 2021 George Washington Prize as the best book on the revolutionary era. She has been elected a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She was president of the 12,000-member American Historical Association in 2018.
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Read the Revolution Speaker Series
Liberty's Daughters
