Mid-nineteenth-century Germany and the United States constitute the background for the life story of Adolf Douai as educator, author, editor, and self-declared radical. A member of the 1848 revolutionary Landtag of Saxe-Altenburg, he was imprisoned by reactionaries and later forced to flee the country. His career in the United States illustrates general sociopolitical conditions faced by German Forty-Eighters arriving as refugees. In Texas, Douai edited an abolitionist newspaper for three years, but threats by Know-Nothings forced him to flee to the north, where he was recruited by organizers of the new Republican Party, who hoped to attract German voters for Frémont (1856) and Lincoln (1860). Douai is generally associated with the Fröbel kindergarten system. His contacts included Robert Blum, Mikhail Bakunin, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Louis Agassiz.
"A great triumph, 'Adolf Douai' captures a German Forty-Eighter's lifelong insurrection that yielded both enormous achievements and dismal failures, as teacher, writer, politician, and revolutionary. From Saxe-Altenburg to East Prussia and Livonia [today Estonia] and on to the New World, the reader is haunted by this human--nay tragic--personality. Arriving with his nobility-status wife and family, Douai first braves the wilds of Texas as an abolitionist, then tangles with the capitalist rigors of the North, where he becomes mired in all the German-American turmoil of his day. Acquiring for American Germans both the highest respect, and by fights with the likes of co-patriot Karl Heinzen, the greatest contempt, Douai typifies the brilliant clan of Forty-Eighter German immigrants. Throughout his life he stuck to his colors, proclaiming in 1883 that Marx had produced 'the greatest scientific work written in the German language.' Only when we get fifty more books like this one will scholars begin to grasp the colossal impact German Forty-Eighters made on America." (La Vern J. Rippley, Chairman, Department of German, St. Olaf College; Editor, Society for German-American Studies Newsletter)
"Randers-Pehrson's study of Douai, an 1848er who 'experienced the revolution and its aftermath' in the Duchy of Saxe-Altenburg, 'one of Germany's smallest states,' is a model of historical research. Based on solid research in the personal papers of Douai and making use of the wide range of literature on the 1848 revolution published on both sides of the Atlantic, she has carefully crafted a sympathetic picture of this complex educator, newspaper editor, radical free-thinker and atheist, uncompromising abolitionist, and Marxist revolutionary.
Randers-Pehrson deserves praise for resurrecting this long-forgotten German-American who arrived in New Braunfels in 1852 with a piano on his wagon and a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Königsberg. Her book forms a valuable addition to the growing list of biographies of 48ers who have all too long stood in the shadow of Carl Schurz." (Dr. Robert A. Selig, Historian and Contributing Editor to 'German Life')
"Randers-Pehrson's study of Douai, an 1848er who 'experienced the revolution and its aftermath' in the Duchy of Saxe-Altenburg, 'one of Germany's smallest states,' is a model of historical research. Based on solid research in the personal papers of Douai and making use of the wide range of literature on the 1848 revolution published on both sides of the Atlantic, she has carefully crafted a sympathetic picture of this complex educator, newspaper editor, radical free-thinker and atheist, uncompromising abolitionist, and Marxist revolutionary.
Randers-Pehrson deserves praise for resurrecting this long-forgotten German-American who arrived in New Braunfels in 1852 with a piano on his wagon and a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Königsberg. Her book forms a valuable addition to the growing list of biographies of 48ers who have all too long stood in the shadow of Carl Schurz." (Dr. Robert A. Selig, Historian and Contributing Editor to 'German Life')