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Course Description

Human rights, an idea that has come to mean a set of core practices and values that society believes are inherent to each and every individual, was not a construct that sprang from a vacuum. In this course we will address the development of the term human rights, from ancient times through to the present day. As a class, we will focus on the religious, moral, and social implications of believing in such inalienable rights, the development of the concept of individual rights and responsibilities, the conflicts and complications that made contemporary human rights what they, and the 20th and 21st century struggles that have pushed human rights near to a breaking point. In particular, the class will look at the definition of human rights, ancient societies’ ideas about social rights, the expanding construction of who deserved such rights, the development of a universalist ideology of human rights in the post-World War II age, civil war and genocide across the globe in the twentieth century, culture and the problems with universal applications of rights, and modern conceptions and defenses of human rights. We will also look at how organizations like the United Nations seek to police a western-centric concept of human rights.

As a history course covering a single topic on a global scale, this course will entail a significant amount of reading, and will focus on the tools and practices necessary for successful comprehension of historical materials, both in the primary and secondary form. Through this class, students will learn to differentiate between primary and secondary historical sources, successfully deconstruct both sets of materials, and understand how to summarize and integrate individual sources with the larger historical narrative of human rights. The culminating project of this course, contributing to an article or stub on Wikipedia, will teach students to gather, evaluate, and synthesize research materials on a single topic. It will also enable students as knowledge producers. Finally, this course will rely solely on Open-Source Educational Materials, grounding the importance of the democratization of knowledge.

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