January 5, 2023

Margaret O’Mara: “The History of Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America” Wednesday, February 8th, 1pm

Please join us as Margaret O’Mara presents a Zoom lecture on the history of Silicon Valley and how it spilled over into the Pacific NW as described in her latest book The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. This is the true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America. 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.

Margaret O’Mara, who received her B.A. from Northwestern University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, 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 two previous books Cities of Knowledge and Pivotal Tuesdays.