The World Reimagined Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

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.

Mark Philip Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmidt Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as the Faculty Director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and Chair of the Committee on International Relations. He is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, and Vietnam at War (2009). He is the coeditor of Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley is also the former President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.