biography
pronunciation:
[leeber]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1800–72)
|
| biography:
| Political reformer, editor, and political scientist, born in Berlin, Germany. Persecuted as a liberal in Prussia, he fled in 1826 and arrived in Boston in 1827. Proposing to translate a German encyclopedia, he so enlarged and revised it that he ended up editing a new Encyclopedia Americana (13 vols, 1829–33). He taught at South Carolina (1835–57) and Columbia (1857–72). Two of his works, Manual of Political Ethics (1838–9) and On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853) provided the first thorough analysis of US government since its inception. Known for his ideas on prison reform, he also drafted a Code for the Government of the Armies of the United States (1863), which was adopted by the Union army. Essentially the first code of international law governing war, it was later used as the basis for the Hague Convention. |
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