Theodor Kirchhoff 1828-1899
Kirchhoff was the son of the lawyer and long-time mayor of Kiel Johann Nikolaus Anton Kirchhoff. He first attended his native Latin school in Uetersen and the Katharineum in Lübeck. In 1847 he moved to the polytechnic school in Hanover. In the Schleswig-Holstein survey, he joined Wasner’s Freikorps. As a lieutenant, he participated in all of the main battles. After the war ended, he emigrated to the United States in April 1851. At first he struggled as a piano player in St. Louis and then also lived in Davenport (Iowa), but never settled for a long time. In 1869 he settled as a partner in a jewelry store in San Francisco, where he died in 1899 after a short, serious illness. He published his books with his brother Friedrich Christian Kirchhoff.
Biographical Overview
- Lived from 1828 to 1899
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Reisebilder und Skizzen aus Amerika by Theodor Kirchhoff
Published in 1875, Theodor Kirchhoff's Reisebilder und Skizzen aus Amerika offers a rich, descriptive travelogue of the American West as observed by a German immigrant, poet, and former Pacific Northwest shopkeeper. The narrative vividly captures the rapid economic and infrastructural transformation of the frontier, documenting early transit oddities like the primitive Walla Walla and Columbia River Railroad alongside the bustling, chaotic atmosphere of regional gold rush boomtowns like The Dalles. A keen insight drawn from the text is how Kirchhoff's position as a European intellectual provides a refreshing outsider's perspective on American expansion; unburdened by the nationalistic mythology of Manifest Destiny, he documents the eccentricities, raw commercialism, and unvarnished realities of the Pacific Northwest with a critical, cosmopolitan detachment often completely absent from domestic colonial boosterism.
2 volumes 19 cm
ONLINE CIRC [ 2 ]
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Last updated: 2023-08-28