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About Margaret
O’Mara's research focuses on the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of U.S. politics, and the connections between the two. O’Mara is the author of Cities of Knowledge (Princeton, 2005), Pivotal Tuesdays (Penn Press, 2015), and The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin Press, 2019). Prior to her academic career, she worked in the Clinton White House and served as a contributing researcher at the Brookings Institution.
Contributions
How U.S. Presidents Can Inspire Economic Innovations That Benefit Everyone
No Jargon Podcast
In the News
Publications
Looks back at four pivotal presidential elections of the past 100 years to show how they shaped the twentieth century. During the rowdy, four-way race in 1912 between Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Eugene Debs, and Woodrow Wilson, the candidates grappled with the tremendous changes of industrial capitalism and how best to respond to them.
Considers the history of high-tech urbanism and traces the environmental discourses embedded within it by sketching short portraits of technological spaces over time and place, from early twentieth-century Cleveland to semiconductor-era Silicon Valley to twenty-first-century Bangalore.
Examines why high-tech development became so economically important late in the twentieth century, and why its magic formula of people, jobs, capital, and institutions has been so difficult to replicate.