ABSTRACT
George Ticknor (1791–1871) was an influential American educator, reformer, and public intellectual. After a brief legal career he moved to Germany to obtain the best possible education in the humanities, and take his knowledge and ideas for educational reform back to the young United States with him. Although he became a professor of modern languages and literature at Harvard, like many of his peers, such as John Quincy Adams, George Bancroft, or Edward Everett, Ticknor was also fascinated by German constitutional theory and history, their connection to politics and human geography, and the forerunners of German legal science. Throughout his life, Ticknor revised his notes and drew on them in his teaching. His unpublished student notebooks from Göttingen, including Progress of Politicks, Statisticks, and Spirit of the Times, have never before been discussed in scholarship either on Ticknor, or on German-American legal education. They offer new insights into German and American mutual perceptions, self-perceptions and exchange, legal education, and the origins of legal science and comparative constitutional law in both Germany and the United States as they were reinvented partly in light of the American Revolution and the Congress of Vienna.
