Sybel

Sybel, HEINRICH VON, German historian, was born at Düsseldorf on 2d December 1817. Perhaps the most eminent of Ranke's pupils, he became successively professor of History at Bonn (1841), Marburg (1846), Munich (1856), and Bonn again (1861), in Munich also filling the post of secretary to the Historical Commission of the Royal Academy of Sciences. At various times between 1848 and 1880 he sat in the parliaments of Hesse, the North German Confederation, and Prussia, as a National Liberal and an opponent of the Ultramontanes. In 1875 the Prussian government made him director of the state archives at Berlin; and as such he was instrumental in publishing the Political Correspondence of Frederick the Great, and in organising at Rome a 'Prussian station for Researches in German History,' besides assisting in the publication of the Monumenta Germaniæ Historica. Moreover he founded and edited the Historische Zeitschrift. Sybel's first book was a history of the First Crusade (1841), in which, applying the critical methods of his master, he destroyed the accepted opinions of centuries; his next the Entstehung des deutschen Königthums (1844). Then, after an interval of nine years, came his first masterpiece, Geschichte der Revolutionszeit von 1789 bis 1795 (3 vols. 1853-58; 4th and greatly improved ed. 1877), a cool, sober, and dignified statement of the historic causes and consequences of that eventful period, based upon a critical examination of official documentary evidence. A second part or continuation, bringing the narrative down to 1800, was published in 2 vols. in 1872-74. His second great work is entitled Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs durch Wilhelm I. (5 vols. 1889-90; English trans., New York, 1891), exhibiting the same qualities. Von Sybel, who also published three volumes of Kleine Historische Schriften (1863-81), died at Marburg, 1st August 1895.