[2] In 1866, he settled in St. Petersburg, but in consequence of a pamphlet on an attempt on the life of the Russian Emperor, which he published at Leipzig while he was traveling abroad, his return to Russia was forbidden.

[1] He settled in New York City, where he taught modern languages for a time in a small private school and made a number of political speeches in the runup to the 1868 election.

His work in German on Louis XIV, Federzeichnung aus der Geschichte des Despotismus,[1] appeared in Leipzig soon after he arrived to the US.

Their son Hermann V. von Holst, the future architect, was born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1874.

[3] Through his books and his lectures at the University of Chicago, he exerted a powerful influence in encouraging American students to follow more closely the German methods[which?]