The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Human Rights in History)
Cambridge University Press, 9/12/2016
EAN 9780521829755, ISBN10: 0521829755
Hardcover, 320 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Concerns about rights in the United States have a long history, but the articulation of global human rights in the twentieth century was something altogether different. Global human rights offered individuals unprecedented guarantees beyond the nation for the protection of political, economic, social and cultural freedoms. The World Reimagined explores how these revolutionary developments first became believable to Americans in the 1940s and the 1970s through everyday vernaculars as they emerged in political and legal thought, photography, film, novels, memoirs and soundscapes. Together, they offered fundamentally novel ways for Americans to understand what it means to feel free, culminating in today's ubiquitous moral language of human rights. Set against a sweeping transnational canvas, the book presents a new history of how Americans thought and acted in the twentieth-century world.
Introduction
how it feels to be free
Part I. The 1940s
1. At home in the world
2. The wartime rights imagination
3. Beyond belief
4. Conditions of possibility
Part II. The 1970s
5. Circulations
6. American vernaculars I
7. American vernaculars II
8. The movement
Coda
the sense of an ending.