H. Arnold Barton, professor emeritus of history, was born in Los Angeles in 1929. Of Swedish descent, he has devoted his research to the history of Scandinavia, especially Sweden, and of Swedes and other Scandinavians in North America. He received his B.A. degree at Pomona College and his doctorate at Princeton University. He taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he retired in 1996. Between 1974 and 1990 he served as editor of the Swedish-American Historical Quarterly. Barton was named "Swedish-American of the Year" in 1988 by the Royal Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Vasa Order of America. In 1989 he received an honorary doctorat from Uppsala University in Sweden. In 2000 he was made Knight-Commander of the Royal Swedish Order of the Polar Star by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Among his books are
- Count Hans Axel von Fersen: Aristocrat in an Age of Revolution (1975)
- Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in America, 1840-1914 (1975)
- The Search for Ancestors: A Swedish-American Family Saga (1979)
- Scandinavia in the Revolutionary Era, 1760-1815 (1986)
- A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840-1940 (1994),
- Northern Acadia: Foreign Travelers in Scandinavia, 1765-1815 (1998)
- Sweden and Visions of Norway: Politics and Culture, 1814-1905 (2003)
- The Old Country and the New: Essays on Swedes and America (2006)
