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History In The Service Of Politics: A Reassessment Of G. G. Gervinus, Charles E. Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

Gervinus's political and scholarly position in nineteenth-century Germany deserves re-examination. Gervinus was a more complicated figure than some of his recent East German champions allege and a much more interesting scholar than his dismissive contemporaries believed. He was a historian too radical to hold a teaching chair but too popular with his readership to be ignored, and a more and more vociferous Cassandra in an age of increasing accommodation to and optimism about Bismarckian power. Gervinus's life was a passion in the service of democratic liberalism; as a result, he suffered during his life, and his reputation has suffered ever …