Carl E. Solberg was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on April 4, 1940. He received his B.A. in History from the University of Minnesota in 1962. He went on to earn his M.A. the following year at Stanford University and his Ph.D. also from Stanford in 1967. His doctoral dissertation was called “The Response to Immigration in Argentina and Chile, 1890-1914”. After graduating, Solberg became an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington in 1967. He continued at UW as an assistant professor except for a one year stint at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1968 until he was promoted to associate professor at UW in 1971. By 1978 Solberg was a Professor of History and continued teaching at the University of Washington.

During this time in college and then as a professor, Solberg made multiple trips to South America to further his research. Visiting Argentina the most, he also travelled through Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico. Through his research and travels, he obtained fluency in Spanish and competence in Portuguese. For his efforts, he was awarded multiple fellowships such as the Social Science Research Council Foreign Area Fellowship in 1973 and the American Council of Learned Societies Grant-in-Aid in 1979. He was also awarded multiple prizes in the field of Latin American Studies.

At UW, he was the Chair of the Latin American Studies Program beginning in 1978 and the Chair of the Department of History’s Committee on Public History beginning in 1979. He taught classes on Colonial Latin America, Social Revolution in 20th Century Latin America, and Modern Latin American History. His research interests surrounded international migration in Latin America, the petroleum industry in South America, and governmental economic policies in Latin America. Solberg published two books on Latin America in addition to multiple articles and essays.