Charles Follen's career as professor, preacher, and social reformer may be divided into two distinct periods. The first twenty-eight years of his life were spent in Europe, where he gained a reputation for political activism in the radical student movement at the German universities. He was trained in the field of law and he pressed for political reform and German unification. Because of his reputation for extremism, however, he was pursued by the police for his clandestine revolutionary activities and fled Germany for Switzerland in 1819 to live in exile before immigrating to America in 1824. He spent the second part of his life in the United States, involved with the equally combative antislavery movement. He lived in Philadelphia for a year and then in western Massachusetts; soon he was made an instructor and, ultimately, a professor of German at Harvard University. He became a major force in the early...