Human Rights in History: Origins, Foundations, Prospects

3 Credits

What are human rights and where do they come from? In this class students will examine the tangled origins of the concept of human rights, its relation to broader transformations of moral conscience, how it became institutionalized in law and modern world politics, and why its history and prospects have become so fiercely contested today. Students will focus on cases from European, imperial, American and global history that illuminate how human rights became part of the contemporary framework of politics, law, culture, and historiography.