Born in 1942, he studied History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Law at the Universities of Cologne, Heidelberg, and Göttingen, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Cologne 1970, Habilitation 1980 at the University of Hamburg. The last twenty years he taught British and American Studies at the University of Kassel, until he retired in 2009. Since the late 1980s his principal field of research is constitutional history, to which he devoted numerous publications, among them a 33-volume edition of constitutions from the late 18th to the middle of the 19th centuries. In 2017, he published his Visionen eines zukünftigen Deutschlands: Alternativen zur Paulskirchenverfassung 1848/49, while his Geschichte der USA appeared in 2021 in its 11th edition.
