Making Sense of the Passions: A Tribute to Mary Beth Norton

In the spring term of 1996 at Cornell, I enrolled in one of Mary Beth Norton’s signature classes, “The Age of the American Revolution.” It is no exaggeration to say that this class changed my life: I have been studying that general topic ever since.

What most impressed me about the class was the sheer range of Prof. Norton’s analysis and narration. We covered social contract theory from seventeenth-century England, battlefield decisions of Patriot and British officers during the 1770s, and fertility patterns among early nineteenth-century women. We did so through a rigorous schedule of well-organized lectures and well-selected readings. More than just a combination of social, political, and economic history, Prof. Norton offered ways to synthesize different planes of analysis into concrete explanations. As my senior thesis advisor a year later, she showed me how to do this on a paragraph-by-paragraph level—to make every part of an argument both integrative and concrete. 

In my own studies on the central “passions” and moral problems of the early republic, I have tried to emulate Prof. Norton’s blend of intellectual capaciousness and analytical precision. My first book focused on ambition: the desire for fame or visibility beyond the range of local experience and memory. My second book (in progress) focuses on vengeance: the desire for retribution often associated by Enlightenment philosophers and statesmen with “savage” peoples living beyond the rule of law. In both cases, I explore the intellectual, religious, and philosophical dimensions of these problems as they manifested in the lives of ordinary and prominent people. In thereby trying to make sense of abstractions, I remain Mary Beth’s student.