SCHMIDT, WILHELM ADOLF (1812-1887), German historian, was born in Berlin on the 26th of September 1812. He became in 1851 professor of history at Zürich, and nine years later professor at Jena, where he died on the 10th of April 1887. He was a member of the Frankfort parliament in 1848, and of the German Reichstag from 1874 to 1876. His historical works deal mainly with modern German history, and the most important of them are: —
Preussens deutsche Politik (Berlin, 1850, and other editions); Geschichte der preussisch-deutschen Unionsbestrebungen (Berlin, 1851); Zeitgenössische Geschichten (Berlin, 1859); Elsass und Lothringen (Leipzig, 1859 and 1870); and Geschichte der deutschen Verfassungsfrage während der Befreiungskriege und des Wiener Kongresses (Stuttgart, 1890), which was published after his death by A. Stern. Schmidt also wrote: Tableaux de la Révolution Française publiés sur les papiers inédits du départment de la police secrète de Paris (Leipzig, 1867-1870); Pariser Zustände während der Revolutionszeit (Jena, 1874-1876), translated into French by P. Viollet (Paris, 1880-1885); Das Perikleische Zeitalter (Jena, 1877-1879); Handbuch der griechischen Chronologie (Jena, 1888); and Abhandlungen zur alten Geschichte (Leipzig, 1888).
See H. Landwehr, Zur Erinnerung an Adolf Schmidt (Berlin, 1887).