Mark Philip Bradley’s The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

Mark Philip Bradley’s The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century is an intellectual history of the language of Human Rights and its place in the thoughts and understandings of everyday Americans. Written over eight chapters in two parts, Bradley asks what meanings the average United States citizen gave the idea of Human Rights in the 1940s and 1970s, arguing that the meanings that those at the bottom gave Human Rights in these periods influenced how the world outside of the United States felt about the idea as well.

Pushing back against the traditional diplomatic and international histories of human rights, which would relegate the idea to the shadows of the Cold War, Bradley instead challenges his reader to contend with the idea of human rights as a debate that happened throughout the world. A debate in which the language and meanings of human rights were still solidifying, with the United States citizenry playing a pivotal role in the 1940s meaning-making of Human Rights and the seemingly absent parent in the 1970s. In these instances of meaning-making, Bradley introduces the idea of human rights as constantly shaped by and shaping “the larger historical processes of empire, decolonization, the Cold War, and globalization after 1945” (9). Further, Bradley also pushes that this complex idea of human rights emerged from the legacies of the 1940s and 1970s that emerged in today’s modern vernacular of rights. 

The World Reimagined is interesting in that it claims to bring the meaning of human rights from the citizenry of the United States rather than the echelons of government or other high-profile institutions. This necessary undertaking to bring the history of human rights down from the top opens the widow to a broader perspective. It does an excellent job of demonstrating the average 1940s citizens’ access to human rights and the meanings presented by the idea at the time. Calling on reportage visualis, World War II and post-war concerns, and legal cases making the news, Bradley demonstrates how and in what terms the average U.S. citizen came into increasing contact with human rights both from instances at the local level and the transnational interactions the war and post-war period produced. Demonstrating how this contact influenced the broader global perception of human rights, Bradley asserts that by the end of the 1940s, the language of human rights focused on individual claims and set aside the collective action and self-determination tensions Native American rights claims and the Global South brought to bear in the world order.

When Bradley turns his attention to the 1970s, he does so because of the resurgence of interaction with human rights language in popular thought during the period. Unlike most diplomatic historians, he does not attribute this resurgence to President Carter but instead to a resurgence of moralism. Arguing that the U.S. citizenry had primarily left behind the language of human rights until the world’s vernacular started to come into the country through Dissidents like Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Havel and their rights claims, diplomatic reports that emphasized bodily integrity and psychic trauma, and local chapters of Non-governmental Human Rights organizations such as Amnesty International which brought Americans into contact with rights claims from various countries. Each piece Bradley showcases brings with it its own dialect of human rights, influencing the meaning of human rights for the American Citizenry. Ultimately, Bradley showcased an American vernacular where “Some human rights in some places mattered. Other modes and locales did not” (224).

The World Reimagined is a complex work, but it is excellent for modern human rights historians to read. Its strength lies in tying together the various examples outlined within the work across the two decades to display how foreign and domestic entanglements and engagements with the languages of human rights created various human rights languages abroad and domestically. To some, its weakness may come from the historian speaking on the present as Bradley does in his coda. However, this history of human rights demonstrates the waves of thought that surround the very idea of human rights. As such, speaking on the view of human rights in the present for U.S. citizens, as Bradley has here, one establishes further avenues of study of the crest and trough of the idea of human rights and begins the groundwork for that study.

Other Reviews:

Review by Clif Stratton for World History Connected

Review talk by Marshall Poe for New Books Network

Citation:

Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, Human Rights in History (New York, N.Y., United States: Cambridge University Press, 2016).