Mary Maples Dunn

Linda S. Wilson

Jill Ker Conway

Ruth Simmons

(1931-04-06)April 6, 1931
Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, U.S.

March 19, 2017(2017-03-19) (aged 85)[1]
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S.

Richard Slator Dunn

College of William and Mary (BS)
Bryn Mawr College (M.A., Ph.D.)

Historian

A cause to plead: The political thought and career of William Penn from 1660 to 1701. (1959)

History

Early life and education[edit]

Mary Maples was born on April 6, 1931, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, to Eva Moore Maples and Frederic Maples, who owned a clothing store. She was the second of four children and the only daughter.[1] While in Wisconsin, she attended a two-room school house.[1] Her father joined the Army during World War II where he remained as an officer after the war, retiring as a Colonel[1] As a result, the family was stationed in multiple bases around the United States and China.[5][6]

Career[edit]

Dunn's scholarship was focused primarily on William Penn, Pennsylvania, and the history of English-speaking colonies in the Mid-Atlantic region of what, following the American Revolutionary War, became the United States. She was a history professor at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where she taught an innovative interdisciplinary course in Latin American Studies in the mid-1970s.


The Mary Maples Dunn Prize, established in 2008 honors "the best article in early American women’s history by an untenured scholar published in William and Mary Quarterly that uses gender as a primary analytical category".[7]

Personal life[edit]

In 1960, she married Richard Slator Dunn, a scholar of American colonial history at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.[2] They had two daughters and three grandchildren from their 56 years together.[2] Dunn remained a great traveler for the rest of her life. She and her husband were in Cairo during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 in Tahrir Square  “It was surreal,” describes Dunn “We could see it all. There we were on this elegant terrace, comfortably viewing it all… That’s the only word for it—surreal.” “We had wandered into a war,” she says. “It was very clear that this was historic. We had CNN on all the time, and had access to Al Jazeera."[8] "And so we witnessed history in the making. It was an unusual experience, and an amazing opportunity. We are glad to be at home, but are feeling the greatest sympathy for the Egyptians, and maybe a little optimistic about their chances for a better regime and a reduction in the misery so many of them experience every day."[9]

William Penn: Classical Republican (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1957)

William Penn: Politics and Conscience (Princeton University Press, 1967)  978-0-691-62331-3

ISBN

Women of America: A Teacher’s Guide (Continental Press, 1976)

The World of William Penn (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), co-edited with Richard S. Dunn

The Papers of William Penn, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981–87) 5 volumes; co-edited with Richard S. Dunn  978-0-8122-7800-2 | ISBN 978-0-8122-7852-1 | ISBN 978-0-8122-8029-6 | ISBN 978-0-8122-8050-0

ISBN

The Personality of William Penn(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983)

Recipes from the Inauguration of Mary Maples Dunn As the Eighth President of Smith College, September 1985, Northampton, Massachusetts. Northampton, (Mass: Marilyn Nelson and the Committee for the Inauguration, 1985) Co-authored with Julia Child.

president emeritus, Harvard University.[10]

Drew Gilpin Faust

the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University.[11]

Mary Beth Norton

Dunn was the recipient of the Radcliffe Medal in 2001

[12]

The Mary Maples Dunn Prize for early American women’s scholarship at the [13]

Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

The Mary Maples and Richard S. Dunn Fund at the [14]

American Philosophical Society

at the Smith College Archives, Smith College Special Collections

Office of the President Mary Maples Dunn files