Pauline Maier was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She did her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, where her interest in journalism and contemporary events led her to become a writer forThe Harvard Crimson. It was there that she first met her eventual husband, Charles Maier.
After graduating in 1960, she was named a Fulbright Scholar and studied at the London School of Economics, while Charles won a Henry Fellowship to Oxford. Upon completion of their fellowships, the two were married at Oxford.
Following an extended honeymoon touring Europe, Pauline and Charles returned to Harvard to pursue doctoral degrees. He chose European history. She initially expected to pursue twentieth-century history but switched to early America after taking a seminar with Bernard Bailyn. At the time, Bailyn was working on the volume and essay that would become Pamphlets of the American Revolution and The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Maier, too, became interested in ideology and the coming of the American Revolution.
She received her PhD in 1968 and her dissertation led first to a groundbreaking article in the William and Mary Quarterly, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” in 1970 and then her first book, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1972). In 1993, the former was voted one of the eleven-most important articles published in the WMQ since the Third Series began in 1943 by readers of the journal.
During this time, she was teaching at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where she stayed for nine years. Following a one-year stint at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Maier became the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at MIT in 1978. Her next work, Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980), emerged out of the Anson G. Phelps Lectures she was invited to give at New York University in 1976.
In 1997, she published what is arguably her most important work, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. Following its publication, she began working on her final book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, which took longer than expected. It was finally published in 2010 and won the George Washington Book Prize.
Maier spent much of her long career involved in reaching general audiences. She regularly gave public lectures, many of which are available on YouTube. She also contributed to numerous television documentaries on the American Revolution and did a number of television interviews. She was always enthusiastic and light-hearted in these kinds of public appearances, which made her an excellent ambassador to the general public for the academic early American history profession.
Maier came of age as an historian at a time when it seemed like the study of early American history was exploding. Her advisor, Bernard Bailyn, was the new leading figure in the study of the Revolution. While much of Maier’s work could be classified as intellectual history, hers was not the same kind of intellectual history as that of her mentor or one of his other students at that time, Gordon S. Wood, who called Maier “one of the most distinguished historians of American history.”
Rather, from radical whiggism in the imperial crisis to the popular ideas of independence and revolutionary constitutionalism of the 1780s, Maier’s primary concern was how ideas played out on the ground rather than on paper.

Source: Wikipedia.org