She is a recipient of the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies for In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.
During her high school years, Norton felt she did not fit with the rest of her classmates, as she was the only student interested in books and history.
When she reached college, at the University of Michigan, she met many other people with the same interests and got involved in national and campus politics.
Thanks to the students' support in Ann Arbor, Kennedy decided to make the Peace Corps one of his priorities during his campaign for the U.S. presidency.
The first time she experienced sex discrimination for being a woman was during her participation in the NSA, where male members would not allow her or other women to take leadership roles.
However, she decided to apply both to the Wilson and the Fulbright fellowships (the only two offered to women at that time) and face sex discrimination.
She did much of her Ph.D. research in England,[3] and in 1970 her work won the Allan Nevins prize from the Society of American Historians for the best-written dissertation.
She spent two years there and got to know Tom Paterson, with whom she would later coauthor a new U.S. history textbook,[3] the two-volume A People & A Nation, currently in its 11th edition.
[3] In 1973 she took part in the first Berkshire Conference on the History of Women and since then the small group in charge, also called “Little Berks”, has grown into a bigger one with up to 60 members meeting every year.
She continued teaching, managing her academic writings, and serving on the faculty senate, having been chosen by election twice to the Board of Trustees.
During her first year there, she took part in converting the small female studies program, of which graduate students had been in charge, into one of the most successful in the United States.
[7] She appeared in Salem Witch Hunt: Examine the Evidence in 2011[8] for the Essex National Heritage Commission and the National Park Service[9][10] She made an appearance in the very first episode of the American version of Who Do You Think You Are?, helping Sarah Jessica Parker trace her Massachusetts ancestry, which involved the Salem witch trials.
She also appeared, with historian Margo Burns, in Season 8 (2016) of the TLC genealogy show, speaking with actor Scott Foley about his ancestor, Samuel Wardwell, who was executed for witchcraft during the trials in 1692.