Programm Wodurch Zur Feier Des Geburtsfestes Seiner Koeniglichen Hoheit Useres Durchlauchtigsten Grossherzogs Friedrich (1887) (German Edition)
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The French Revolution Tested By Mirabeau's Career V2
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
The French Revolution Tested By Mirabeau's Career V1
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Hermann Eduard von Holst was a German-American historian. He was the author of Constitutional and Political History of the United States.
Background
Hermann Eduard von Holst was born on June 19, 1841 in Viljandi, a small town of one of the former Baltic provinces of Russia and now in the republic of Esthonia. He was the seventh in a succession of ten children born to Valentin von Holst, a Lutheran minister, and to his wife, Marie Lenz. The Von Holsts belonged to the considerable group of German colonists who had settled along the Baltic shores during the fourteenth century, and German influences surrounded young Eduard in family, church, and school throughout his formative years.
Education
While he was still at the Gymnasium, the death of his father left the family in desperate circumstances, and only by giving private lessons and following the most Spartan code of life was he able to continue at school and, later, to take up his university studies at Dorpat and Heidelberg.
Drawn early to history, he specialized in the modern field, taking his doctor's degree at the latter institution in 1865.
Career
Had not fate interfered, Von Holst's magnum opus would have been devoted to France, for he worked for a considerable period in the archives of Paris and put out as the first fruits of his labors a study of the reign of Louis XIV. Even before this work saw the light, however, the crisis had been precipitated which was destined to divert his interest from Europe to the United States. Detesting the autocracy of his native Russia, he ventured (1867) to attack it in a fiery pamphlet which promptly elicited an order of arrest. Since he was abroad at the time, he could not be apprehended but he now no longer had any place he could call home. Resolutely turning his back on Europe, he boarded an emigrant ship and in 1867 landed in New York, a friendless, penniless human atom violently hurled from its familiar orbit. Although acquainted from youth with every variety of hardships, his sufferings in New York, where he was obliged to eke out a miserable existence by manual labor and chance teaching, were terrible. They laid the foundation of that ill health which even thus early began to attend him as a dark specter and converted his later years into a long martyrdom heroically supported. A better prospect dawned when, at the request of a number of Bremen merchants, he undertook a study of suffrage in the United States. In a characteristic burst of emotion, he had already resolved to throw in his lot with the western Republic, and now by the Bremen commission his professional interests were directed toward the same goal.
Imperceptibly expanding under his hands, the suffrage study grew until it assumed the proportions of a lifework devoted to the unfolding of the American political experiment. For such an enterprise the ideal background would have been an American university; but as no institution on this side of the Atlantic had room for him, he accepted (1872) a call to the newly founded University of Strassburg, transferring thence two years later to Freiburg in Baden, where he fully came into his own and dominated the academic scene for the next twenty years.
It was during his Strassburg period that the first volume of his monumental work appeared (1873) under the name, Verfassung und Demokratie der Vereinigten Staaten (Constitutional and Political History of the United States). When this was translated three years later into English, the American publisher adopted the title, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States, a distinctly unfortunate choice since the volume was far less a reasoned history than an introductory essay on the constitutional developments after 1750 leading up to the slavery controversy. Slavery, in the author's eyes preeminently a moral issue, was set in the center of the stage and clearly indicated as the all-absorbing theme of the drama about to be exhibited.
In Volume II, which appeared in 1878 simultaneously in German and in English dress--a practice thenceforth maintained to the end--the great theme of slavery is considered in elaborate detail, beginning with the presidency of Andrew Jackson; and the subsequent volumes, which in the English version's reach a total of seven, carry the account down to its inevitable catharsis in the Civil War. In spite of its vastness, sure to act as a deterrent on the general reader, the work has an amazing intensity which it owes in part to the compact theme but, overwhelmingly, to the moral fervor pulsing through it like a ceaseless tide.
By 1892, when the last volume appeared, Von Holst had become an outstanding figure among writers on American history, and on the founding of the University of Chicago was with eminent propriety called to the head of its department of history. At Chicago he taught for the next seven years, until his shattered health forced him into retirement. Thenceforth he resided in Italy and Germany. He died in Freiburg, Baden.
In 1894 he delivered a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute, published under the title The French Revolution Tested by Mirabeau's Career. It is a work of solid information, recounting with epic energy the story of how revolutionary France, provided with a savior in Mirabeau, was tragically unable to make use of him. His other major publications were Das Staatsrecht der Vereinigten Staaten (1885; translated in 1887) and a biography, John C. Calhoun (1882). The latter work represents its hero as an American Don Quixote, perversely moved to place a pure heart and a sturdy mind at the service of a detestable cause. An essay on John Brown (1888) bears the same moral stamp as all his other works.
Achievements
Von Holst was a prominent historians who wrote the famous Constitutional and Political History of the United States. Through his books and his lectures at the University of Chicago, he exerted a powerful influence in encouraging American students to follow more closely the German methods of historical research.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Politics
Like every German of his generation responsive to the influences of his time, young Von Holst grew up a liberal in thought and a unitarian in politics, inspired by an unwavering faith in the upward progress of mankind. On turning to history he felt the breath upon him of Haeusser, Von Sybel, and Treitschke, leaders of what is often called the Prussian but might more expressively be designated the Unitarian school. Conceiving, like these admired prototypes, history to be purposive and its individual actors responsible for the good and evil of their day, he was immutably convinced that the Union cause was written in the stars and that its Southern opponents were evil men, manifestly and wilfully tarred with the evil of slavery.
Personality
Passionately interested in life, Von Holst plunged into all the controversies of the day, never hesitating, when his conscience issued the command (as for instance in the imperialist controversy precipitated by the annexation of Hawaii) to take the unpopular side. Unlike most professors, he was an orator of extraordinary eloquence, and with his long haggard form, his dramatic voice and blazing eyes, he fairly hypnotized his audience.
Connections
Just before sailing from New York, Holst married Annie Isabelle Hatt, of old New England stock. They had two children.
