Margaret O’Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two. Margaret is the author of two acclaimed books on the history of the modern technology industry: The Code (2019) and Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search For The Next Silicon Valley (2005). She also is a historian of the American presidency and author of Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century (2015), as well as a coauthor of the widely used United States history textbook, The American Pageant. From 1993 to 1997, she served in the Clinton Administration as an economic and social policy aide in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Margaret O’Mara chronicles how entrepreneurship, venture capital, and state and federal funding transformed Silicon Valley into a crucible of American economic dynamism. She explores the rise of each era’s key companies and their products, as well as their changing relationship with government, including the slow evolution of computing capabilities as an issue of national security and economic competitiveness.