Near the end of the eighteenth century the field of Amerikakunde - a distant relation of present-day American Studies - made its appearance in German academic circles. Amerikakunde typically combined history, political science, economics, and geography, but it also included the study of such things as botany and mineralogy. The new field was represented by scholars like Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch, a professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel who, with Christoph Daniel Ebeling, co-edited the Amerikanisches Magazin, Germany's first scholarly journal devoted to the United States. As Hegewisch put it, he preferred to state facts without argumentation. His texts remained mostly descriptive, and their faulty judgments derived from biases in his sources.

The preeminent representative of Amerikakunde, though, was Hegewisch's Hamburg collaborator, Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741-1817). Indeed, for contemporaries and posterity alike, Ebeling was the most distinguished German scholar of the United States. His Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika (Geographic description and history of America) appeared over a time span of twenty-three years but remained incomplete. Still, before 1834, when the first volume of George Bancroft's monumental History of the United States was published, no other work of comparable scope and learning existed in the field. Ebeling admired the American polity, in particular the prevailing measure of individual liberty that, as he saw it, contrasted so favorably with French libertinage.