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

This book uncovers how human rights gained meaning and power for Americans in the 1940s, the 1970s and today.This book shows readers how and why human rights have become the moral language of our time. It explores the making of a twentieth-century global human rights imagination and its American vernaculars in times of war, decolonization and globalization during the transformative decades of the 1940s and 1970s.This book shows readers how and why human rights have become the moral language of our time. It explores the making of a twentieth-century global human rights imagination and its American vernaculars in times of war, decolonization and globalization during the transformative decades of the 1940s and 1970s.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. This is a magnificent and much-needed book on how the United States has wrl#