Like a Sponge Thrown Into Water

Ten glorious months in Europe with one of the nineteenth century's greatest thinkers; I live the life of a long dried sponge thrown into water, enthused the celebrated intellectual Francis Lieber (1798-1872) in a letter from Paris to his friend, the future Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. In that letter, Lieber, a scholar well known on both sides of the Atlantic, described his joyous return to Europe in 1844 after two decades teaching and working in the United States. During his ten-month sabbatical, Lieber gloried in Europe's people, places, art, theater, and diversity. He not only wrote letters to his friends but also chronicled his travels in a diary. Lieber's previously unpublished account of these months, including passages translated from their original German, offers a fast-paced and exciting picture of the European culture and political milieu of the 1840s. The United States's first political scientist, the German-born Lieber was the founder of the Encyclopedia Americana, wrote the Civil War-era code of military conduct that has become the basis for modern war crimes trials, and published works of significance in the fields of penology and political philosophy while