In Mexican Prisons

Popular history has not venerated Eduard Harkort as a hero of either Santa Anna’s 1832 uprising in Mexico or the Texas Revolution against the revolutionary-turned-dictator. The journal of Harkort, a middle-class German mining engineer, recorded during his two years of fighting and imprisonment in Mexico, reveals the activities and feelings of a brave and multitalented man who withdrew from nineteenth-century corporate life and ultimately found himself in battle, before a firing squad, and in prison.

First published in Germany in 1858 by Harkort’s son-in-law, the journal of Eduard Harkort has now been translated and annotated by Louis E. Brister. In Brister’s introduction, the journal itself, and Harkort’s letters to friends, readers can sense the harrowing experiences faced by Harkort, who had training in the Prussian army, during his adventures with the ragtag rebel army of Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna.

Thoroughly documented, this self-told tale of a foreigner’s adventures in the turbulent history of Mexico will capture the imagination of the reader and intrigue the scholar.