Ivo Banac (; 1 March 1947 – 30 June 2020) was a Croatian-American historian, a professor of European history at Yale University and a politician of the former Liberal Party in Croatia, known as the Great Bard of Croatian historiography. , Banac was a consultant for the Bosnian Institute. He died after a serious illness at age 73. Biography Banac was born in Dubrovnik in 1947. In 1959 he emigrated to the United States with his mother, reuniting with his father who had escaped from Yugoslavia in 1947. After his father's death in a traffic accident a year later, Ivo lived with his mother in New York City, where he studied history at Fordham University, graduating in 1969. In the same year Banac moved to California, where he obtained M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Stanford University. Although he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society, by his own account he was not attracted by the West Coast flower power movement of the late 1960s. Banac worked at the Stanford University Department of History and Linguistics from 1972 to 1977, and then moved back to the East Coast to teach at Yale University. While at Yale, he earned his tenure, and was a two-time master of Pierson College.His 1984 book The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize for the best North American book in the field of Russian and Eastern European studies. During his stay in the United States, Banac regularly visited Yugoslavia. While visiting Zagreb in 1971, he met Vlado Gotovac and Franjo Tuđman, who would both become major Croatian political figures after the fall of communism. Banac remained in close contact with Gotovac until his death in 2000; on the other hand, he reportedly didn't think highly of Tuđman, describing him as a person who could not tolerate dissent. Nonetheless, Banac organized Tuđman's lecture at Yale University in 1990. In 1990, Banac was accepted as an associate member in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Between 1994 and 1999 he was the director of the Institute on Southern Europe at the Central European University, Budapest. From 1990 onwards, Ivo Banac was also active in Croatian politics. He joined the Croatian Social Liberal Party (HSLS) and became one of the strongest critics of Franjo Tuđman and his government, especially with regards to policy towards Bosnia and Herzegovina. He