165. Facing the Long Year of Revolution with Mary Beth Norton

Summer has arrived and with it the end of Season 4 of Conversations at the Washington Library. 

But don't despair! While we're busy recording new episodes for Season 5, we'll keep the conversation going by bringing you the audio version of recent and upcoming Washington Library Live Stream Digital Book Talks. 

In fact, for today’s episode, we bring you Dr. Kevin Butterfield’s recent chat with Dr. Mary Beth Norton about her new book, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution.

Norton is Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita at Cornell University. For over 40 years, she has been one of the leading scholars of the Revolutionary era, with books on American Loyalists, women and gender, and witchcraft.

As with all live streams, you might hear an audio glitch here and there. If you’d rather watch the video version, complete with the images Norton and Butterfield discuss, check it out at www.mountvernon.org/gwdigitaltalks

Season 5 of Conversations will begin rolling out in mid-August. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this program.

About Our Guest:

Mary Beth Norton is an historian, specializing in America before 1800. She is a recipient of the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies for In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada and was a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for History (1997). She has received four honorary degrees and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Mellon, and Starr Foundations, as well as from Princeton University and the Huntington Library. She has been elected a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

She served as Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions in the University of Cambridge in 2005-06. She is Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History emerita at the Department of History at Cornell University. Norton is a former president of the American Historical Association.

About Our Guest Host:

Kevin C. Butterfield is the  Executive Director of the Washington Library. He comes to Mount Vernon from the University of Oklahoma, where he served as the Director of the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage and Constitutional Studies Program, holding an appointment as the Wick Cary Professor and Associate Professor of Classics and Letters. He is the author of The Making of Tocqueville's America: Law and Association in the Early United States (Chicago, 2015).