Swedish-American Historical Society Records - H. Arnold Barton Additions

H. Arnold Barton succeeded Franklin D. Scott not only as editor of the Swedish Pioneer (now Swedish-American) Historical Quarterly, in 1974, but subsequently as the preeminent scholar of Swedish America.

Born in 1929 in Los Angeles and raised in California, he is a great great grandson of Peter Andersson, one of the original members of the Peter Casell party that settled New Sweden, Iowa. He graduated from Pomona College and served in the U.S. Coast Guard from 1953-57 before receiving a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1962.

He taught at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 1960-63, and the University of California-Santa Barbara, 1963-70, when he joined the faculty at Southern Illinois University, from which he retired in 1996. He has served the Society in various positions (director and publications committee member) almost continuously since 1972, a period of more than forty years. He was Swedish American of the Year in 1988, received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 1989 and was awarded the Society Carl Sandburg Medal in 1995. In 2009, he and his Swedish-born wife, Aina, moved to Sweden. He passed away September 28, 2016 in Stockholm at the age of 86.