Pauline R. Maier, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died earlier this week after a brief illness. She was 75 years old.
Professor Maier was a native of St. Paul, Minnesota. She was a 1960 graduate of Radcliffe College and then studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science under a Fulbright Scholarship. She returned to Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in history in 1968.
Her first academic position was at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where she taught for eight years. After a brief stint at the University of Wisconsin, she joined the MIT faculty in 1977 and remained there for the rest of her life.
Professor Maier was the author of several notable books including From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (Alfred A.Knopf, 1972) and The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). She was also the author of American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) and her latest book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (Simon & Schuster, 2010).