The World Reimagined
Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

This book uncovers how human rights gained meaning and power for Americans in the 1940s, the 1970s and today.

Mark Philip Bradley (Author)

9781108721905, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 September 2018

324 pages, 27 b/w illus. 2 colour illus. 1 table
23 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.45 kg

'This work is informative and adds new perspectives on American human rights history. … Bradley's work provides a judicious and insightful summary of America's role - both its promise and its limitations - in promoting human rights in the three decades since the Second World War.' Matthew Hill, Journal of the Conference on Faith and History

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.

Subject Areas: History [HB]