Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History Emerita, was honored May 28 by the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAA) with its highest alumni award.
The Centennial Medal recognizes alumni of GSAA who have made fundamental and lasting contributions to knowledge, their disciplines, their colleagues and society. Norton was one of four 2025 honorees.
“Mary Beth Norton revolutionized the study of the American Revolution and the centuries that preceded and followed it by establishing the field of colonial women’s history,” said Jill Kastner, a member of the GSAA Council, in announcing Norton’s award. “At the same time, Norton revolutionized the academic world around her as the first woman on the history faculty at Cornell University.”
After completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, Norton came to Harvard and studied under Bernard Bailyn, completing her dissertation on loyalists who opposed the American Revolution. Norton came to Cornell in 1971 and taught for 47 years until her retirement in 2018.
“Mary Beth was born to be the first woman historian at Cornell,” said Kastner, quoting Isabel Hull, the John Stambaugh Professor of History Emerita at Cornell, who joined Norton on the history faculty in 1977. “She was always a thoroughgoing professional, passionate about her scholarly interests, creative in her use of archives and records and infinitely endowed with excellent university political judgment.”
Norton held leadership positions on the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the National Council on the Humanities and the American Historical Association, on which she served as president in 2018 representing the 10,000 members of the profession.
During that time, she shaped the organization’s response to President Trump’s Muslim ban during his first term, while also instituting a new sexual harassment policy for the association, Kastner said.
Norton’s book “Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1997. She is one of six authors of the widely used two-volume history textbook, “A People and a Nation,” first published in 1982, with 10 subsequent editions.
Her other books include “The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789” (1972); “Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800” (1980); “In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692” (2003), which won the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies given by the English-speaking Union of the U.S.; “Separated By Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World” (Cornell University Press, 2011); “1774: The Long Year of Revolution” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020); and “I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column” (Princeton University Press, 2025).
Norton, speaking at the event, said she entered Harvard planning to study 19th Century American intellectual history, but an early course on the colonial period and an obscure pamphlet by a Boston radical changed her trajectory.
“It felt as if James Otis Jr. reached out to me over the centuries and said, ‘Here’s the 18th century, you should pay attention to it,’” Norton said. “And I have followed that ever since.”
She also spoke about the impact of Bailyn’s mentorship on her career. “Although other senior male historians expressed doubts about my ventures into the study of women and eventually gender, Bud never did,” she said. “To me, Bernard Bailyn exemplifies Harvard then and now, open to many fields of study and innovative thinking.
“Today, Harvard is firmly standing up for those values,” she said. “I am proud to be an alum of this university and especially proud to be honored by it.”
