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Herman Ehrenberg wrote the longest, most complete, and most vivid memoir of any soldier in the Texan revolutionary army. His narrative was published in Germany in 1843, but it was little used by Texas historians until the twentieth century, when the first—and very problematic—attempts at translation into English were made. Inside the Texas Revolution: The Enigmatic Memoir of Herman Ehrenberg is a product of the translation skills of the late Louis E. Brister with the assistance of James C. Kearney, both noted specialists on Germans in Texas. The volume’s editor, James E. Crisp, has spent much of the last 27 years solving many of the mysteries that still surrounded Ehrenberg’s life. It was Crisp who discovered that Ehrenberg lived in the Texas Republic until at least 1840 and spent the spring of that year as ranger on the frontier. Ehrenberg was not a historian, but an ordinary citizen whose narrative of the Texas Revolution contains both spectacular eyewitness accounts of action and almost mythologized versions of major events that he did not witness himself. This volume points out where Ehrenberg is lying or embellishing, explains why he is doing so, and narrates the actual relevant facts as far as they can be determined. Ehrenberg’s book is both a testament by a young Texan “everyman” who presents a laudatory paean to the Texan cause, and a German’s explanation of Texas and its “fight for freedom” against Mexico to his fellow Germans—with a powerful subtext that patriotic Germans should aspire to a similar struggle, and a similar outcome: a free, democratic republic.

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9781625110695

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JAMES E. CRISP, Professor Emeritus of History at North Carolina State University, has been researching and writing about the era of the Texas Revolution for more than fifty years. He is a Fellow of the TSHA and a winner of the T. R. Fehrenbach Award for his book Sleuthing the Alamo. LOUIS E. BRISTER, Professor Emeritus of German, Department of Modern Languages, Texas State University, was the author of several journal articles and books, including In Mexican Prisons: The Journal of Eduard Harkort, 1832–1834. JAMES C. KEARNEY teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. He is the author of several books and articles on Texas German history, culture, and literature. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas State Historical Association and serves on the advisory board of the German-Texan Heritage Society.

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