Friedrich Christoph Dahlmam, a German historian, born in Wismar, May 13, 1785, died in Bonn, Dec. 5, 1860. He was educated at Wismar, Copenhagen, and Halle, began to lecture at Dresden in 1809, and became professor of history at Kiel in 1812. In 1815 he was appointed secretary of the permanent committee of the Schleswig-Holstein clergy and nobility, and opposed the Danish policy in regard to the duchies. The government in consequence refused to admit him to full standing as a professor, and in 1829 be accepted a professorship at Gottingen. In 1837 he protested against the abrogation of the constitution of Hanover by King Ernest Augustus, and was dismissed from the university with Jakob Grimm, Gervinus, and four other professors, signers of the protest. In 1842 he was appointed professor of history at Bonn, and on the breaking out of the revolution of 1848 he was sent to the Germanic diet by the king of Prussia. He was elected to the Frankfort parliament, and was a member of the committee appointed to draft a new German constitution. His influence in the parliament was exerted in favor of a hereditary German empire, under the king of Prussia as emperor. But Frederick William IV. declined the offered crown, March 28, 1849, and in May Dahlmann and his associates withdrew from the parliament.

His subsequent activity in the assemblies at Erfurt and Berlin was less prominent. His most important works are: Vita Ansgarii, published in Pertz's Monumenta Germanim Eistorica; Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der deutschen Geschichte (2 vols., Altona, 1822-'3); an edition of the Chronik von Dithmarsen (2 vols., Kiel, 1827); Quellenkunde der deutschen Geschichte (Gottingen, 1830); Die Politik auf den Grund und das Mass der gegebenen Zustdnde zuruckgefuhrt (1835); Geschichte Danemarks (3 vols., Hamburg, 1840-'43); Geschichte der englischen Revolution (Leipsic, 1844); and Geschichte der franzbsischen Revolution (1845). His biography, by Spingler, was published in 1870.