MIT World Speakers

Pauline Maier

Pauline Maier is a leading scholar of early American history. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968. Her book publications include From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1972), The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980), and The American People: A History (1986), a textbook for junior-high-school students. In 1997 Maier wrote American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.--it was on the New York Times Book Review editors "Choice" list of the best 11 books of 1997 was and a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award.

In 1998 she received MIT's Killian Award, given annually to one senior faculty member for outstanding achievement. In the summer of 2002, the W.W. Norton Company published Inventing America, a new American history college textbook distinguished by its consideration of science and technology within the larger history of the United States. At present she is working on a book about the ratification of the federal Constitution.