15 - A Mediator between Two Historical Worlds: Hermann Eduard von Hoist and the University of Chicago

Summary

In January 1892, the eminent historian Heinrich von Sybel, one of the main representatives of the Prussian school of political historians, advised his friend and colleague Hermann Eduard von Hoist to accept a position with the newly founded University of Chicago:

For a proficient man the decisive factor for the choice of his habitat must be his sphere of action. Concerning your person everything is said with that. . . . As a pioneer of German scholarship you will have an effect in a field of almost unlimited perspective in Chicago. You will not be lost for Germany, however, and you will create a yearly growing market for the best commodity of German production.

Sybel's coaxing recommendation, with its terms “production” and “market” reverberating with notions of cultural imperialism, had its effect on Hoist. He accepted the call from the University of Chicago, but it was not the first attempt on the part of an American university to win Hoist as a history professor. Other universities had already recognized that Hoist would make an invaluable contribution to the development of their still nascent history departments.