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Margaret O'Mara

Biography

Margaret O'Mara

Margaret O’Mara is the Howard & Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. She writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two, and is the author of CITIES OF KNOWLEDGE, PIVOTAL TUESDAYS and THE CODE. She received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Northwestern University. 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.

Margaret O'Mara

Books by Margaret O'Mara

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara - History, Nonfiction

Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government --- and always had been --- and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University.