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...