The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

Human Rights in History

by Mark Philip Bradley

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.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

Published September 12, 2016

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cultural (as opposed to legal or intellectual) history of human rights — how did human rights get popular? Largely derivative in terms of periodization and, as with too many books on human rights, underplays how the REAL heyday of human rights discourse was The Long 1990s (11/9 to 9/11). Rightly understands the American popular and political embrace of human rights from the late 1970s as largely influenced by the adoption of this language by dissidents in Eastern Europe and Latin America, who were the real pioneers.

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although we have grown accustomed to thinking of global human rights as a given, it is in fact a relatively new concept. This book examines how global human rights, i.e. the idea that all humans have certain inalienable rights simply because they are human rather than having rights because of the state in which they live-- became a part of our daily life in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Thus this book is not a diplomatic history of human rights. Instead it focuses on social movements, popular literature, and film at two critical junctures (immediate post-WWII era and the 1970s) in order to show how Americans came to embrace the language of human rights, albeit within a limited framework.

The author emphasizes that the language of human rights, particularly since the 1970s, was a "guest language" imported from abroad, which Americans then gave a particular inflection. Unlike in Europe, human rights was a concept that Americans in the 1970s applied to the rest of the world, not to inequalities at home. Moreover, Americans had a narrow definition of human rights, limiting it largely to political and civil rights. Social and economic rights, which had been part of the late-1940s discussion, did not reappear in American discussion of human rights until the 1990s. In the wake of 9/11 and graphic revelations about the US government's use of torture as part of the war on terror, American human rights activist had to confront their government's culpability in human rights violations (Note: the author makes clear that this was hardly the first time the US had been guilty of using torture, but previous uses had largely been concealed from the American public's view). This confrontation produced fissures in the Americans' embrace of human rights, as more and more Americans now accepted the use of torture within the context of the war on terror. As Bradley notes, the 2016 presidential campaign witnessed Donal Trump championing the use of water boarding to appreciative applause.

Although Donald Trump has since repudiated these statements, there can be no doubt that the language of global human rights -- always fragile in the Unites States (the US has refused to sign most UN directives, including on the rights of the child and on the rights of women) -- is under attack. As the author notes, the human rights movement in the United States has largely failed to attract conservatives or incorporate the working class. This failure, along with the limited emphasis on social and economic rights must be addressed so as to stop the ongoing marginalization of human rights movements in the United States.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history, politics, and future of global human rights and the American articulation.

[Quynh Anh]

Zondervain Lib - Taylor Univ