Lawrence J. Baack

In retirement, Baack returned to academic research and was a visiting scholar in the history department at the University of California, Berkeley from 2003 to 2011. His research interests and publications have focused on European scientific exploration in the 18th Century.

He subsequently entered graduate school in history at Stanford University. There he was a student of Peter Paret, the distinguished Europeanist, who greatly influenced his approach to the study of history. He received his PhD in 1973. His academic career began at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he was promoted and tenured, and became Vice Chair of the History Department. He also served as Head of the Area Studies Program in International Affairs and Business, Chairman of the University Libraries Committee and a member of the University Research Council. While at Nebraska, he was also a Guest Professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and was selected by the National Science Foundation as the U.S. Antarctic Fellow for 1979–80. During that year he participated in American research activities in Antarctica including the exploration of the Ellsworth Mountains. At Nebraska his major published research studies examined social and agricultural change in 18th Century Denmark, and Prussia's German and European policies and notions of German nationhood during the first third of the 19th Century. The latter work has been called “a remarkable scholarly achievement” (Felix Gilbert), and the reviewer in the English Historical Review concluded “Baack's outstanding study of Pre-March Prussia cannot be ignored by anyone interested in modern German history.” (William Carr).

Baack was born in Berkeley, California, which remains his home today. He graduated in 1964 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a major in history. At Berkeley, his advisor was Raymond J. Sontag, the well-known scholar in European Diplomatic History, and was on the varsity Track Team running under the legendary Olympic Coach, Brutus Hamilton. He was later asked to edit a collection of Hamilton's writings and letters.

Baack was an officer in the United States Navy from 1964 to 1969, and had three deployments to Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

He has been married, since 1964, to Dr. Jane E. Baack, a retired professor of organizational behavior at San Francisco State University. He has two children, James, an information technology engineer at PG&E, and Sally, professor of strategic management, and chair of the management department at San Francisco State University, and four grandchildren.

Lawrence J. Baack (born May 13, 1943) is an American historian of modern Europe, with a particular interest in Germany and Scandinavia, and a sub-specialty in Antarctica. He is the author of Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth Century Denmark, Christian Bernstorff and Prussia: Diplomacy and Reform Conservatism 1818-1832, and Undying Curiosity: Carsten Niebuhr and the Royal Danish Expedition to Arabia 1761-1767, among other works.