Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Additional Contact Information: Available for comment on record or on background on history of Silicon Valley and high-tech industry, presidential politics, technology policy, Bay Area and Seattle politics esp. re tech industry.

About Me: Margaret O’Mara is Professor of History at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two. She is the author of Cities of Knowledge (Princeton, 2005), Pivotal Tuesdays (Penn Press, 2015), and is currently working on a history of the modern high-tech revolution and its relationship with the worlds of politics and finance, to be published by Penguin Press in 2019.

O’Mara is a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians and a past fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. She received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Northwestern University, and she has taught at Stanford and Penn in addition to the University of Washington. Prior to her academic career, she worked in the Clinton White House and served as a contributing researcher at the Brookings Institution.

She lives in the Seattle area with her husband Jeff and their two daughters.

Recent Publications: Books:

Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Academic Book Chapters, Articles, and Essays:

“The Long Game,” in Crucible: The President’s First Year, ed. Michael Nelson, Jeffrey Chidester, and Stefanie Georgakis Abbott (Miller Center Studies on the Presidency, University of Virginia Press, 2018)

“Capitalism on the Campaign Trail,” in The Presidency and American Capitalism Since 1945, ed. Roger Biles and Mark Rose (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018).

“Silicon Dreams: States, Markets, and the Transnational High-Tech Suburb,” in Making Cities Global: The Transnational Turn in Urban History, ed. Nancy Kwak and Andrew Sandoval-Strausz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

“The Environmental Contradictions of High-Tech Urbanism,” in Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here, ed. Jeffrey Hou, Ben Spencer, Thaisa Way, and Ken Yocum (New York: Routledge, 2015), 26-42.

Expertise by Topic: American Presidents, Capitalism, Computational, Economic History, Gender, Higher Ed, Politics, Technology, Urban History