Kuno Francke was commonly regarded as the leading Germanist in America for the more than three decades he served as Professor of the History of German Culture at Harvard University. His achievement as a pedagogue, literary historian, cultural critic, and public advocate for German values and ideals was substantial, and he contributed to the fundamental reorientation of the then somewhat limited native tradition in Germanistik associated with such names as Karl Follen, George Bancroft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Frederick Hedge. He introduced to his university the broad interdisciplinary method of the Geisteswissenschaften (Human Sciences), arguing in particular that the competent consideration of German literature and art necessarily depended upon the larger context of German national history. Francke's publications and public addresses on German literary, philosophical, and social themes provided an English-speaking audience with a comprehensive, expertly informed, and conceptually provocative treatment of German cultural evolution from the Teutonic...