Penn State Harrisburg Faculty Details

Vita

Prof. Michael Barton received his Ph.D. in American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and has been a faculty member in the American Studies program at the Harrisburg campus of Penn State University for more than three decades. His teaching and research fall into three areas: the values and experiences of Civil War soldiers, the American national character, and the history of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

His Civil War books are Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (Penn State, 1981), The Civil War Soldier: A Historical Reader (NYU, 2002), co-edited with Prof. Larry Logue, and The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader (NYU, 2007) also co-edited with Logue. Recently he began editing with his students the "lost" history of a Pennsylvania Civil War unit, the 209th infantry regiment.

He has lectured on the American national character at conferences in Scotland, Finland, Ireland, Australia, Poland, Bulgaria, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Greece, the Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Georgia, and Denmark, where he was a Fulbright professor of American Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 1999. He has also been a US State Department consultant to American Studies programs at seven universities overseas.

His Harrisburg histories began with Life by the Moving Road: An Illustrated History of Greater Harrisburg (Windsor,1983; 2nd ed. 1998), Harrisburg’s Old Eighth Ward (Arcadia, 2002), which he co-edited with Prof. Jessica Dorman, became the basis for an original musical, "The Bloody Eighth," performed by the Capitol Dinner Theater in 2003-2004. His latest volumes are Citizen Extraordinaire; The Diplomatic Diaries of Vance McCormick in London and Paris, 1917-1919 (Stackpole, 2004), which he co-edited with more than fifty student editors; and To a Harmony with Our Souls: A History of Jazz in Central Pennsylvania (Benchmark, 2005), a team project for which he was editor-in-chief. He supervises websites that feature student work on both the Eighth Ward and the McCormick Family Papers. Recently he began directing the re-establishment of the Harrisburg City Archives. The Harrisburg Patriot-News has named him Top Harrisburg History Writer, and the Pennsylvania Federation of Museums and Historical Organizations gave him its Award of Merit for Contributions to Public History. He was recently elected to the Council of the Pennsylvania Historical Association.

Prof. Barton is married to Dr. Jane Barton, a Harrisburg eye surgeon, who is the founder and senior partner of the Premier Eye Care Group. She is also the past president of the Dauphin County medical society and the Pennsylvania Academy of Ophthalmology. His son, Jonathan, is a medical student at the Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, and his daughter, Effie, is a law student at Harvard.

Education

• Ph.D., American Civilization, University of Pennsylvania, 1974
• A.M., American Civilization, University of Pennsylvania, 1970
• M.A., History and Sociology, University of Nebraska, 1967
• B.S., Sociology, University of Nebraska, 1965