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Paul Douglas Lockhart

Historian of early modern Europe, with a focus on Denmark and the Oldenburg dynastic state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

I am currently Professor of History and Brage Golding Distinguished Professor of Research at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA. My current book project, Days of Wrath: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of Søren Jensen Quist, reconstructs Denmark’s most notorious murder case as a study of the power relationships in Danish rural society, the interaction between clergy and state authority, and premodern understandings of law, truth, and justice.

My previous scholarship includes seven single-author books, including Denmark, 1513-1660: The Rise and Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy (Oxford UP, 2007); Frederik II and the Protestant Cause: Denmark’s Role in the Wars of Religion, 1559-1596 (Brill, 2004); Sweden in the Seventeenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2004); and Denmark in the Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648: King Christian IV and the Decline of the Oldenburg State (Associated University Presses, 1996). I have also written trade books for broader lay audiences, including Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare (Basic Books, 2021); The Whites of Their Eyes: Bunker Hill, the First American Army, and the Emergence of George Washington (HarperCollins, 2011); and The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army (HarperCollins, 2008).