Leonard Levy

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Leonard W. Levy (April 9, 1923 - August 24, 2006) was the Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Professor of Humanities and Chairman of the Graduate Faculty of History at Claremont Graduate School, California. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

He was the author of Origins of the Fifth Amendment, which won him the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for History. He also wrote almost forty other books, such as The Establishment Clause and Religion and the First Amendment, and was editor-in-chief of the four-volume Encyclopedia of The American Constitution and The Unpopular Ones. He also wrote Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side in 1963 with a paperback edition in 1973 with a preface discussing the criticism the book received for not being in praise of Jefferson and his thoughts and responses to these critics.

Levy also wrote about the history of sedition in early American history. His Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History (1960), and later update Emergence of a Free Press (1985), argued that the majority of early Americans were accepting of prosecutions for sedition. This work argued against the prevailing assumption of the time, as put forth by Zechariah Chafee.

In 1990, Levy was appointed a Distinguished Scholar in Residence; Adjunct Professor of History and Political Science at Southern Oregon State College in Ashland, Oregon. [1] He died August 24, 2006 in Ashland.