Pauline Maier, historian of American Revolution, dies at 75 Dr. Maier (pronounced MAY-er) was a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was the author or co-author of six books, including popular textbooks used in middle schools and colleges. In her other books, she breathed new life into seemingly familiar historical subjects - including the Declaration and the Constitution - by returning to the original 18th-century documents and discovering insights. She wrote with a narrative flair that was rare and refreshing for an academic. "What she did is to go back and look at everything fresh," Mary Beth Norton, a historian at Cornell University, said Thursday. She paid a lot of attention to what was happening on the ground at the time. Dr. Maier was perhaps best known for her 1997 book, "American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence," which stirred controversy for its assertion that the Declaration was a collaborative effort and did not spring, pure and unfiltered, from the mind of Jefferson. The New York Times named it one of the best books of the year. In her book, Dr. Maier uncovered more than 90 little-known local resolutions in which communities throughout Colonial America declared independence from the British crown. Jefferson's draft of the Declaration, she wrote, simply reflected a growing political movement that reached its culmination on July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress. "He was no Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from the hand of God," Dr. Maier wrote of Jefferson. What generations of Americans came to revere was not Jefferson's but Congress's Declaration. She described the collective effort that produced the Declaration as "an act of group editing that has to be one of the great marvels of history." Jefferson's original text was skillfully edited by other Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Richard Henry Lee, who removed some of what Dr. Maier viewed as rhetorical excesses. Over Jefferson's objections, they sometimes made his prose more graceful and direct. Jefferson's original line, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable," was changed to: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The awkward phrase "from that equal creation they derive rights" was amended to one of the most memorable and ringing passages of the Declaration: "they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." She gave Jefferson credit for putting pen to paper, but she had little patience with latter-ear mythologizers who credited him with single-handedly conceiving the idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson, Dr. Maier declared in "American Scripture," was "the most overrated person in American history."