Hermann Eduard von Holst's works are now largely and deservedly unread except as an object lesson in the transience of historical interpretations. However, he was the first fully trained, professional, academic historian to devote major attention to the national history of the United States, and he long influenced the views of American history, especially of the Civil War era, that were held on both sides of the Atlantic.

Holst was born at Fellin in Livonia in the dominions of the czar of Russia, in what later was to become the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Despite the fact that his family had been in Baltic Russia for five centuries, Holst was German through and through. His father, Valentine von Holst, was a Lutheran minister who died when Holst was in secondary school, leaving his wife, Marie Lenz von Holst, and their family of ten children in poverty. It was...