Historian Mary Beth Norton has been nominated for president-elect of the American Historical Association, the principal umbrella organization for the profession. If elected, she would serve as president beginning in January 2018, for one year. The results of the on-line election are expected in July.
“I am deeply honored to have been nominated, whether or not I'm selected,” says Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History. “My opponent, David Blight of Yale, is a good friend and my textbook co-author. We anticipate a cordial contest.”
The textbook that Norton, Blight, and others co-authored, “A People and a Nation,” now in its 10th edition, has been one of the most widely used U.S. history texts in college survey courses since its first appearance in 1982. Norton, an acclaimed historian of early America, is also the author of “Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800,” “Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society,” “In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692” and “Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World.”
She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship and the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies. Norton was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1997.