Gunther Barth, 78; Professor Wrote of the American West

Gunther Barth, 78, a UC Berkeley professor and author on the history of the American West, died Jan. 7 in a Berkeley hospital after a brief illness.

Barth, who taught at Berkeley from 1962 until his retirement in 1995, was born near Dusseldorf, Germany. By the age of 15, he was in the German army; he was wounded in action twice during World War II. After his regiment surrendered in Italy, he spent two years as a prisoner of war held by the British. He spent much of that time in hospitals.

After his release, Barth attended the University of Cologne and helped to salvage Chinese artworks in the area, sparking his interest in history. He spent a year at the University of Oregon on a U.S. State Department fellowship, and immigrated in 1951, earning a bachelor’s degree in European history and a master’s in American history at Oregon.

Barth, appealing to mainstream readers, published both his master’s thesis, “All Quiet on the Yamhill: The Civil War in Oregon,” and his Harvard doctoral thesis, “Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-1870.”

Among Barth’s other books were “The Age of Industrialization in America” in 1968, “Instant Cities” in 1975 and “City People” in 1980. A Los Angeles Times reviewer called the 1980 book “a valuable example of street-level history,” and a New York Times reviewer pronounced it “rather like an old Cecil B. De Mille spectacular, only much better.”