Akira Iriye (editor) - The Human Rights Revolution: An International History

THE HUMAN RIGHTS REVOLUTION

REINTERPRETING HISTORY

Wm. Roger Louis, series editor

The series Reinterpreting History is dedicated to the historians craft of challenging assumptions, examining new evidence, and placing topics of significance in historiographical context. Historiography is the art of conveying the ways in which the interpretation of history changes over time. The vigorous and systematic revision of history is at the heart of the discipline.

Reinterpreting History is an initiative of the National History Center, which was created by the American Historical Association in 2002 to advance historical knowledge and to convey to the public at large the historical context of present-day issues.

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The Human Rights Revolution: An International History EDITED BY Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock

An International History

EDITED BY
Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and
William I. Hitchcock

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The human rights revolution : an international history / edited by
Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock.
p. cm. (Reinterpreting history)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-19-533313-8 ISBN 978-0-19-533314-5 (pbk.)
1. Human rightsHistory.
2. Human rightsPolitical aspectsHistory.
I. Iriye, Akira. II. Goedde, Petra, 1964 III. Hitchcock, William I.
JC571.H7752012
323.09dc23 2011017618

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To the Memory of Kenneth J. Cmiel

AKIRA IRIYE AND PETRA GOEDDE

KENNETH CMIEL

G. DANIEL COHEN

ELIZABETH BORGWARDT

WILLIAM I. HITCHCOCK

ATINA GROSSMANN

ALLIDA BLACK

SAMUEL MOYN

BRAD SIMPSON

BARBARA KEYS

CARL J. BON TEMPO

PAUL RUBINSON

SARAH B. SNYDER

KELLY J. SHANNON

ALEXIS DUDDEN

MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

This book, like the field of human rights, has been a long time in gestation. It began as a series of papers delivered to the 2004 meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in Washington, D.C. Akira Iriye chaired a panel on the topic Writing the Global History of Human Rights that featured contributions by Mark Bradley, Kenneth Cmiel, Alexis Dudden, and Atina Grossmann. The original idea had been to use these essays as a nucleus of a volume on new trends in historiography as part of the Oxford series on Reinterpreting History. Yet the project was dealt a blow by the sudden death of Ken Cmiel, whose energy and leadership in this evolving field has been missed by his friends, colleagues, and peers across the discipline. He had done a great deal to place this field on the agenda of historians, and many of the essays in the collection have their origins in his seminal writings. The volume is dedicated to his memory.

In late 2008, William Hitchcock and Petra Goedde co-chaired a conference at Temple University on Human Rights as International History. The event was held, in part, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also to gather together work in the field by a new generation of scholars whose fresh arguments and new archival discoveries helped transform human rights scholarship. We are grateful to the International History Workshop and the History Department at Temple for the support we received in hosting that gathering.

Susan Ferber, our always creative and indefatigable editor, saw that by combining the essays from the AHA panel and the Temple event, we had the makings of an outstanding state of the field volume. Susan earned our profound gratitude for keeping this project going and prodding us to bring it to fruition, even when it seemed it might not quite make it to the finish line. She is a visionary editor, and we all feel enormously proud of the volume she has done so much to create.

Akira Iriye

Petra Goedde

William I. Hitchcock

ALLIDA BLACK manages the Womens Political Participation Program of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. She is also Research Professor of History and International Affairs at the George Washington University, where she chairs the Eleanor Roosevelt Project Advisory Board. She has written widely on Eleanor Roosevelt, womens human rights, and womens political engagement. She has coordinated (and is continuing to organize) mentoring and policy workshops on womens human rights for the United Nations, the Department of State, and a variety of nongovernmental organizations. She is the recipient of the George Washington University Millennium Medal, two honorary doctorates, and several community service and human rights awards.

CARL J. BON TEMPO is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Albany. He is the author of Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (2008). He currently is working on a history of human rights politics in the United States after the 1970s.

ELIZABETH BORGWARDT is a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for 201011. A historian and lawyer, she will serve as the Richard and Ann Pozen Visiting Professor of Human Rights at the University of Chicago in 2012. She is Associate Professor of History and Law (by courtesy) at Washington University in St. Louis.

MARK PHILIP BRADLEY is Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is completing a book-length monograph that explores the place of the United States in the global human rights imagination of the twentieth century.

KENNETH CMIEL was Professor of History and the director of the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights until he died suddenly in 2006. He taught intellectual history and the history of human rights at the University of Iowa since 1987. He is the author of Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (1990), based on his Allan Nevins Prizewinning dissertation, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (1995) and numerous articles on intellectual and human rights history.