The Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire – James Bryce

Bryce approached the subject of the Holy Roman Empire from only one angle, but that a very important one. What interested him was to trace the history of the imperial idea from the founding to the termination of the Holy Roman Empire. He was not interested in its actual history save in so far as that narrative illuminated his major thesis. He endeavored to interpret and to evaluate the influence of a great political idea in medieval and modern history. The facts throughout the book were reduced to that minimum necessary to give coherence and cohesiveness to the subject. The only descriptive chapter in the work is that entitled “The city of Rome in the middle ages,” which is a masterpiece of historical composition, without equal in English literature.

 

The Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire

Format: Paperback.

The Holy Roman Empire.

ISBN: 9783849678500

Available at amazon.com and other venues.

 

Bryce as Ambassador to the United States (from Wikipedia):

However, even this time, Bryce’s cabinet post was held only for a brief period because as soon as February 1907, he was appointed British Ambassador to the United States of America. He kept this diplomatic office until 1913 and was very efficient in strengthening the Anglo-American friendship. Bryce made many personal friends in American politics such as US President Theodore Roosevelt. The German ambassador in Washington, Graf Heinrich von Bernstorff, later admitted how relieved he felt that Bryce was not his competitor for American sympathies during the World War period even though Bernstorff managed to keep the US from declaring war until 1917.

As an author, Bryce quickly became well known in America for his 1888 work, The American Commonwealth. The book thoroughly examined the institutions of the United States from the point of view of a historian and constitutional lawyer and at once became a classic. In developing material for his book, Bryce painstakingly reproduced the travels of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America (1835–40). Although Tocqueville emphasized the egalitarian nature of early-19th-century America, Bryce was dismayed to find vast inequality: “Sixty years ago, there were no great fortunes in America, few large fortunes, no poverty. Now there is some poverty… and a greater number of gigantic fortunes than in any other country of the world” and “As respects education… the profusion of…elementary schools tends to raise the mass to a higher point than in Europe… [but] there is an increasing class that has studied at the best universities. It appears that equality has diminished [in this regard] and will diminish further.” The work was heavily used in academia as a result of Bryce’s close friendships with men such as President James B. Angell of the University of Michigan and successively Charles W. Eliot and Abbott Lawrence Lowell at Harvard. Against the backdrop of the New Immigration of the late nineteenth century, the work also became a key medium for popularising the view of American history as distinctly Anglo-Saxon, comparable with similarly exceptionalist “Whig” histories written in late Victorian Britain.

 

(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

 

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