Hermann Eduard von Holst (June 19, 1841 – January 20, 1904) was a German-American historian and author. Von Holst emigrated to the United States and wrote extensively on the Constitution of the United States, largely from an anti-slavery perspective.

Biography

Holst was a Baltic German born in Fellin, Russian Empire (now Viljandi, Estonia). He was the seventh of ten children of a Lutheran minister. His father died while he was in the Gymnasium, and he had to teach and live frugally to stay in school.

He studied history at the Imperial University of Dorpat (now Tartu) and at Heidelberg University, where he received a doctorate under Ludwig Häusser in 1865. In 1866, he settled in St. Petersburg, but in consequence of a pamphlet on an attempt on the life of the Russian Emperor, which he published at Leipzig while he was traveling abroad, his return to Russia was forbidden.

He decided to emigrate to the United States in July 1867. In the autumn of 1869, he became assistant editor, under Alexander Jacob Schem, of the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Conversations-Lexicon.

His work in German on Louis XIV, Federzeichnung aus der Geschichte des Despotismus,

On April 23, 1872, in Manhattan, he married Annie Isabelle Hatt, the daughter of the Rev. Josiah Hatt (1821–1857)—pastor of the Baptist Church in Hoboken, New Jersey—and his wife, Mary Thomas. Their son Hermann V. von Holst, the future architect, was born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1874.

A call to a professorship of history in the newly reorganized University of Strasbourg brought him back to Germany in 1872. In 1892, he became head of the department of history at the University of Chicago. Retiring on account of ill-health in 1900, he returned to Germany and died at Freiburg in January 1904.

Von Holst's works are almost all on American topics.

Notes

References

  • Obituary in Political Science Quarterly, vol. v, pp. 677-78.
  • Obituary in Nation (New York), vol. lxxviii. pp. 65–67.
  • New York Times Obituary
  • New York Times on University of Chicago appointment
  • Guide to the Hermann Eduard Von Holst Collection 1869-1902 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center