This volume explores the place of human rights in history, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that these conflicts presented, with case studies focusing on the 1940s through the present.

• Contributors


• Introduction: Human Rights as History, by Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde


• Part I: The Human Rights Revolution


• 1. Kenneth J. Cmiel, The Recent History of Human Rights


• 2. G. Daniel Cohen, The Holocaust and the "Human Rights Revolution": A Reassessment


• 3. Elizabeth Borgwardt, "Constitutionalizing" Human Rights: The Rise of the Nuremberg Principles


• 4. William I. Hitchcock: Human Rights and the Laws of War: The Geneva Conventions of 1949


• 5. Atina Grossmann, Grams, Calories, and Food: Languages of Victimization, Entitlement, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany 1945-1949


• 6. Allida Black, Are Women 'Human'? The U.N. and the Struggle to Recognize Women's Rights as Human Rights


• II. The Globalization of Human Rights History


• 7. Samuel Moyn, Imperialism, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Human Rights


• 8. Brad Simpson, 'The First Right':The Carter Administration, Indonesia and the Transnational Human Rights Politics of the 1970s


• 9. Barbara Keys, Anti-Torture Politics: Amnesty International, the Greek Junta, and the Origins of the Human Rights 'Boom' in the United States


• 10. Carl J. Bon Tempo, From the Center-Right: Freedom House and Human Rights in the 1970s and 1980s


• 11. Paul Rubinson, "For Our Soviet Colleagues": Scientific Internationalism, Human Rights and the Cold War


• 12. Sarah B. Snyder, "Principles Overwhelming Tanks": Human Rights and the End of the Cold War


• 13. Kelly J. Shannon, The Right to Bodily Integrity: Women's Rights as Human Rights and the International Movement to End Female Genital Mutilation, 1970s-1990s


• 14. Alexis Dudden, Is History a Human Right? Japan and Korea's Troubles with the Past


• 15. Mark Philip Bradley, Approaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights


• Index

Charles Warren Research Professor of American History, Emeritus, Harvard University. Author of China and Japan in the Global Setting (1992), The Globalizing of America (1993), and Cultural Internationalism and World Order (1997), among other titles.