Henry Edwin Dwight

Henry Edwin Dwight (born April 19, 1797 in New Haven , Connecticut , † August 11, 1832 ibid) was an American educator and travel writer.

Life

Henry Edwin Dwight was the eighth son of Yale University President Timothy Dwight IV. Dwight graduated from Yale in 1815 and then worked in his older brother Benjamin Woolsey Dwight's shop in Catskill , New York . From 1823 he turned to the study of theology at the Andover Academy in Andover , Massachusetts ; but had to give up the plan to become a pastor in 1824 because of his poor health. From 1824 he traveled to Europe. In 1825/26 he studied in the footsteps of George Bancroft at the University of Göttingen and in 1826 at the University of Berlin . It was during this time that his description of Northern Germany, published in 1829, of the academic education system and student customs in Germany was created, with special consideration of the situation in Göttingen. The later historian and diplomat John Lothrop Motley prepared for his studies in Göttingen in 1832 with the help of Henry Dwight's book and confirmed his descriptions, also with regard to the Corps ' incredible joy in fencing , in one of the first letters from Göttingen to his mother, so that Dwight's detailed descriptions are to be regarded as authentic:

"... the accounts you have read in Dwight ... is not the slightest degree exaggerated, in fact it is entirely impossible to exaggerate them."

- John Lothrop Motley, letter dated July 1, 1832

Dwight's report is an important source for the history of student associations , not least because of the strong pressure to persecute the university authorities at the time , as the German students did not prepare detailed descriptions of, for example, the forbidden duels, for example, of the forbidden duels, so that corresponding news is mostly only in the university court files if the parties flew up, so after parlance's then drafted were.

After his return in 1827, Henry Dwight, who had become an admirer of the German education system in Germany, ran a high school together with his brother Sereno Dwight called New Haven Gymnasium in New Haven, which was reopened in 1831 because of the poor health of the two brothers was abandoned. He lectured in Philadelphia and New York City on his experiences in Europe, but turned down a professorship at New York University shortly before his death.

Fonts

• Account of the Kaatskill Mountains. In: The American Journal of Science and Arts 2 (November 1820)
• Travels in the north of Germany: in the years 1825 and 1826, G. & C. & H. Carvill, New York 1829 digitized
• Together with Sereno Dwight: Prospectus of a school for the education of boys to be established at New Haven, Conn. 1827 digitized

literature

• Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography : "Dwight, Henry."
• GW Curtis (Editor): The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley , 1889, Chapter II: Germany; University Life Internet Archive (digitized version)
• Karl Ortseifen, Winfried Herget, Holger Lamm (Eds.): Picturesque in the highest degree: Americans on the Rhine - a selection of Travel Accounts, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 1993, p. 36 ff. Digitized

Web links