This fall if you look back, but i was particularly delighted to thismark here as part of fall series. We go way back to the early days of my time here at the Wilson Center running the colton history project. Mark has moved on to bigger and Better Things and he will be talking about this today. Hes the professor of history at the university of chicago along reimagined american human rights in the 20th century , the book he will be talking about today. His books include familiar made strange american icons and ,rtifacts published last year vietnam and war, 2009, and the making of postcolonial vietnam published in 2000. President ofast the American Society of foreign relations. With that, mark, it is great to have you here. Mr. Bradley it is nice to see very familiar faces. It has been a very long time, and its nice to see you. Eric, i was your ta a really, really long time ago. He was a great professor. Its also a real pleasure to see warren colin, who in many ways i feel like gave me the kind of intellectual courage to be who i am, so thanks for being here, warren. I want to take people to the 20th of january, 1977, just a frome bit down the mall here. When jimmy carter announced in , peopleural address are more politically career and now craving and demanding their place in the sun, not just for the benefit of their own condition but for basic human rights. In the wake of carters inaugural address, human rights became front and enter in Popular Culture in the United States with as many as mayof americans saying in a 1977 poll that they had read or heard a great deal or fair amount about human rights. Most american historians have followed the selfperceptions of jimmy carter and his contemporaries, arguing that carters inaugural address and pioneering is not always successful human rights diplomacy propelled human rights to unprecedented heights of prestige and power. In their view, carters embrace of human rights and its broader popular resonance in the 1970s had their source in a purely domestic context and then gradually cascaded out into the world. The causal motor in these americanbased accounts are the crisis of confidence in the wake of watergate and the vietnam war and a revolves in they say, at andrealpolitik of nixon foreign policy. American assumptions about their own primacy in shaping the Global Human Rights order ran just as deep in the 1970s themselves. As one carter political operative put it in the moment, the United States is the one nation where human rights is center stage for the world. Global, there was a explosion of interest in human rights in the 1970s, but thereans did not get first. Indeed, one might argue that they got there last. Today to talk to you about the 1970s to offer a slice of the larger approach i take to americans and human rights in my book the world reimagined. The world is centrally concerned with how and why human rights went from an exotic aspirational linkage in the mid20th century to a kind of everyday vernacular today. It does so by exploring the entanglements of the United States in the rise of what i call the Global Human Rights imagination. In part, i argue what human rights were understood to be by the historical actors that gave them shape and form, weather in isout of the United States, a considerably messier and more complex process than the linear narrative of the new human rights history would allow, among others the seminole count of human rights politics in utopia the seminal account of human rights politics in utopia. Is anr what i hope alternative narrative about the place of the United States in 20thcentury human rights history, and i hope to make a modest contribution to a new way of writing Global Human Rights history itself. I am not so much concerned with the state or with great power politics or with the diplomatic negotiations through which the International Human rights legal regime came to be formed, the subject of much of the new human rights history. The central protagonists of my book are what we would now call nonstate actors, although they often did not identify themselves in that way in the historical moment. Diplomats and policymakers are , but theely absent emphasis is on what we might in retrospect human rights amateurs who collectively brought into being a distinctly 20thcentury human rights imagination. Rights dentistslot of involved in Global Human Rights politics. Activists, students, and senior citizens. They were the race of the growing Human Rights Movement growing humane Rights Movement. Quite simply, it was these amateurs that made it believable to a variety of the american public, and critically, they did so on a transnational campus. Globals in which transformation fundamentally transition how human rights were experienced is at the center of my work, how it dealt to have rights or to lose them were critical to the growing believability of the growing itsn rights imagination in growing american vernacular. So, too, were apprehending how the suffering of strangers have come to matter as much as ones own. The making of human rights history, my analysis marks a departure from the more common practice of writing both international and human rights history. Historians seemingly more easily articulate the kind of imagine physicality of geopolitics than feeling,tructures of and yet, the historical presence is often understood effectively before it is perceived in other ways. Recent work in literary theory helps us see what has been largely invisible to historians. , itpresent is not an object is a thing that is sensed and under constant revision. A genre under of social time and practice in which a relation of persons or worlds is sensed but the rules of habitation and genre of storytelling about it are ends able. Human rights and its believability emerged in just such volatile and unstable moments. That these american sensibilities had global roots is also critical to the argument that i have found. To focus on the place of the United States in the making of the Global Human Rights imaginary might initially strike you as a kind of return to the exception list narrative that too often has informed the writing of American History. In fact, my aim is quite the opposite. Seeking to provincial eyes how provincialize how america operated on the world stage by lifting up the policies initially set up in motion far beyond americas shores. In doing so, i hope to situate American History both smaller and larger the nation. It can be difficult for some u. S. Historians to acknowledge the extent to which american engagement with human rights in the 1970s was the story of the importation of ideas into the United States. Into a american domestic space rather than the exportation of American Values out into the wider world. If americans had been fully present at the creation of a Global Human Rights order in the 1940s and they were, i think, and that is part one of my book, and human rights have banished from discourse by the end of 1970s. By the end of the 1970s, human rights was everywhere on the american scene. So, how come that is the case . Critically when human rights , moved from the margins of Global Political discourse, it becomes a central optic through which a variety of people saw the world around them. It did so almost everywhere before human race came to human rights came to the United States. Not only was Amnesty International a leading global rights Nongovernmental Organization in the 1970s, the contours of human rights thought and practiced in the United States were deeply shaped ofa Diverse Network local actors in the soviet union, asia, and latin america. So did western european leaders and activists in the reaction to political oppression in greece in the 1960s and various preparatory meetings that led to the helsinki accords. In all this, i think it is fair to argue that american actors were initially big players. Bit players. Ofan rights is best thought in 1970s america as a kind of guest language. One that would return to the cultural politics of the United States through what americans came to know about the thought of dissidents in the soviet union and other such transfer transnational rights rights advocates as Amnesty International. It is about broader, global transformations. Once setting the language of Global Human Rights in motion, it needs attention. Before we can even begin to appreciate the american return to human rights in the late simply in terms of number, there 1970s. Is no question that the decade of the 1970s was a ngosnational human rights moment. Amnesty International Reported only 32,000 members worldwide 1973. By 1980, the organization counted hundreds of thousands of members in 134 counties and a Nobel Peace Prize amongst its accomplishments all in a single decade. Beyond Amnesty International, the number of organizations working on human rights increased exponentially over the course of the 1970s. This surge of transnational nonstate human rights politics was part of an even larger mobile explosion in social mobilization around a variety of fields. Human Rights Advocacy emerged simultaneously with new concerns about the environment, humanitarianism and global feminism. The presence of transnational human rights politics and the broader language of social mobilization simultaneously reflected but also contributed to a profound shift in world order in the 1970s. On one level the statebased political structures that have formed the International Cold ii order after world war began to come undone, but just as importantly, the bonds between individuals in the world individuals, states, and the World Community started to reshape the types of political claims that were made in the International Sphere. This was boosted by the growing presence of more witness to suffering and injustice. These transformations in the world structures deeply shaped the transnational politics of human rights then and now in the United States and elsewhere in the world. I want to move relatively quickly through the structural dimensions of these transformations. They are likely to seem more familiar today too many of you. To say briefly about structure, the 1970s were a Tipping Point between the post world war ii world and the world we live in today. With a set of structural changes pushing up against the nation statebased International Order that had organized World Politics since the end of world war ii. Again, in what is now an increasingly familiar story the , rise of Global Finance capitalism began to up and at the end upend prevailing statehood economic planning. Begin to shape political life after 1945. And howard markets at the expense of government, 1970s globalization allowed nationstates to manage their own economies. In holds the deconstruction of the post war welfare states in its various iterations, whether it be in the United States or western europe or japan. To use a phrase coined by some political scientists in the 1970s, between a variety of state and nonstate actors, rather than cold war style superpower politics increasingly shaped the contours of the international system. The state, of course, did not disappear in this New Territory lies era of globalization, as it did to reinvent itself. It became a more disaggregated state. They began to form Cross National horizontal linkages as well as vertical linkages around common concerns, trade, finance, environment, or sometimes with human rights. The end of empire was another crucial structural shift in the 1970s. By the mid1970s, almost all of the colonized world had become independent, territorially based nationstates. With the end of empire, the migratory patterns that had characterized the first decade after 1945, these migratory patterns focusing largely around europe began to give way to flows of people from asia and africa. The colonizing wars of independence and heightened ethnic conflict accounted for much of this movement. Significantly, many of the primary subjects of the new Global Politics of human rights in the late 20th century emerged out of these conflicts. Along with new global flows of capital and people, technological changes and their diffusion also helped make possible and accelerate new linkages that informed globalization and certainly, politics. An rights the first Communication Satellite was launched in the 1960s. Television increased worldwide in significant ways increase the circulation of images in massive ways. Jet travel was made cheaper and cheaper to make air travel from one place to another less expensive than ever before. Fax machines and overnight mail was made possible. I told my students how exciting it was that you could move , and theyrey fax not particularly excited about it. Yes, the computer moves with great speed, and, yes, so the social media, but the growing reach in the 1970s did rest on in that moment what was an increasingly sophisticated use of forms that allow information and people to flow in ways they had not before. Back up just a bit and to say, to argue that the processes of globalization in the 1970s began to transform post1945ures of the International Order is not to suggest that globalization is without a history itself or the dramaticof these changes were also not present in the past. We also increasingly know more about the presence of globalization in the 19th , but what i want to say is to stress too much historical continuity of the world of the 1970s and beyond. Again, the intensity and philosophy of Global Networks i thek did begin to remake nationstate and more importantly, unbundle relationships between sovereignty and state power. So if these structural transformations in a sense provided an undergirding for , the new mobilizations main part of the argument has to do with assets rather than structure. I argue that a new global sensibility about power came of both power and territoriality came about to entirely reshape the kinds of political claims made by nonstate actors in the 1970s and i think beyond. In this new global affect of the 1970s, leaf in the authenticity authenticity of the interior world of individual suffering rather than the external structures that might have produced the suffering in the first place was central to the kind of clinical claims that were being made by activists including human rights activists. Individual consciousness, lived experience, moral witness, in a testimonial turn became key words in this era. It began to reshape the contours of Global Politics and morality. The rise of an emergent holocaust consciousness and its insistence on the power of individual witness and testimony, i think, was critical to the rise of this new structure and feeling in the 1970s. It was the trial of enough inhmann Adolf Eichmann israel in 1962 in which the global testimonial turn seemed to first emerge. Livingn with the ss under a false identity and argentina had been captured two years earlier and brought to israel to stand trial for his role in organizing the mass deportation of European Jews into nazi extermination camps in such as auschwitz during world war ii. Coverage of this trial not only put the holocaust on the front page of world newspapers, but the decision by the Israeli Government to call so many survivors as witnesses was unprecedented. In the nurnberg trials, in the 1940s, perpetrators and written documentation had been the focal point. Victims left to the side. Now, the victims and lived experience were at the center of the trial. One might say that the testimony of the first witness not only represent a rupture in the trial but also in broader, popular understandings of the holocaust. She opted to speak in you dish yiddish rather than hebrew. As she gave her testimony. On hearing the language of the slaughtered and the burned. The project became in part the memory of survival and often graphic murder of European Jews by the nazi regime and survivor testimony resonated far beyond the israeli courtroom. It brought into being a heightened holocaust consciousness in the 1970s, and it also directly and profoundly informed the testimonial practices through which advocates of humanitarianism, environmental protection, and human rights in the 1970s begin began to remake the form and content of transnational political and moral intervention. Central to their efforts was the insistence on forms of public witness and concerns for the psyche, therapeutic, emotions, as important as statistical measures in making various truth claims. More witness begin to shape the new global affect of the 1970s. Amnesty internationals foundational practice was to bear witness to the suffering of nonviolent innocence. To demand the release on the sole ground that the suffering was unjust, and they helped to and it was hoped to generate a collective sense of purpose amongst empathetic global publics. If witness and testimony a methodgly served as of staking claim in the International Sphere in the 1970s, it was accompanied i how expertture in knowledge constituted and how that knowledge came to inform political and moral claims. The authority of nonstate transnational actors like amnesty increasingly rested on a new ground of experience, one in andh and which sentiment reason was blended in ethically motivated empirical inquiry that combine personal testimony, statistics, and independent research. What one anthropologist had usefully termed motivated truth. I dont mean to suggest conventional forms of expertise went out the window in the 1970s. Such key of histological made up what was considered professional expertise as a Central Point in the practice of witnessing in the 1970s. Increasingly, they were refracted through a moral frame in which the knowledge circulated and produced by transnational amnesty groups did a certain kind of political work. In these new forms of cultural production of knowledge, a Political Authority of midcentury experts in the public sphere think of scientists Robert Oppenheimer or economist Jonathan Goldbach began to give way to the nonpolitical make up Nongovernmental Organizations. Nonstate actors simultaneously reshaped expressions of moral truth and the contours of Political Action for interNational Audience. Factfinding missions organized by amnesty in the 1970s, which became foundational for later human rights practice, point to the ways in which this turn to motivated truth and the broader transformation in global structure and affect beckley affected the form and content of human Rights Advocacy. Example, 1974 amnesty chile, which is cameal of how this process to be. The 80page report was fair in its discussion of the political, economic, and social tensions in a few pagesing only on background information. It noted in the report that it does not invalidate the validity of the evidence for or against political claims made by supporters of the former ina eddie and a the former allen de government. Instead, the bulk of the report was centered on the Political Prisoners their identities, their situation, their treatment, and their condition. The major concern of Amnesty International, the report reminded readers, was to seek release of Political Prisoners of conscious, to work for the adequate treatment of all prisoners, and to seek protection under word of law. This was amnestys motivation. It was the chile report that combined the statistics with ofsthand personal accounts torture. The report did offer the kind of material evidence that would establish the veracity of legal claims about rights violations. The number of prisoners detained, the weight of detention, the prison conditions, incidents of torture and execution and disappearance, and the evidence offered in support of these claims relied expedition of expertise. Conversations with chile military officials, religious figures, members of the press, religious figures etc. ,but threaded through the report were series of testimonials this like this one that provided a more visceral witness to the torture of Political Prisoners. They tied me to the table, they powerful lights above me, they body. Bles on my and they applied current to a part of my body. The next day, it was worse. They did things that cannot be described. There were threats of death until we gave the interrogators what they wanted. In this form of human rights reporting and advocacy, evidence presented in the form of objective data in the individual narrative testimony and witness became mixed up or entangled. The empirical and the expiration experiential reshaped one another for a global audience. It should be said that the insistence on authenticity that of experience that made up the global affect of the 1970s produced its own blind spot. In a classic essay, women rights that the evidence of experience precludes objective observation on structures of power and authority that gave them shape and form. It is not individuals who have experienced, he argued, the that have constituted true experience. Amnesty and other Rights Groups in the 1970s often encouraged only a minimal exploration of political conditions, revolutionary ideology, or military power in the reporting on human rights abuses. Nor was amnesty concerned with what might he lost what might be lost through the lens of personal experience. Amnesty and its supporters worked for the release of individual prisoners of conscience across the world. Individual suffering mattered and not the structures of power that produced them. The 1970s Global Human Rights imagination like this broader social mobilization of which it was a part emerged in these new structures of feeling. That in privileging witness and to experiential began outrank the prevailing notion of power and authority, yet the far more intricate than a simple appropriation of a novel transnational language. Instead, what human rights would e to mean over the decade and those meanings were often unstable and contested was worked out across a variety of local vernacular. The global and local human language across the era were essentially coproduced by. Ne another human rights in the 1970s operated everywhere that produced a variety of local vernaculars. Just as it did for the creation of a Global Human Rights imagination elsewhere in the world in the 1970s, the transnational lens of moral witness begin to shape american understanding of what it meant to gain and to lose human rights. When human rights finally came with full force to the United States in the late 1970s, it s global circulation as a transnational guest language would shape of the region and the limits of an american human rights vernacular. Many americans would work out what human rights men on the ground. The Grassroots Efforts and also through the new human Rights Groups that appeared on the american scene in the 1970s. It is crucial to how Global Human Rights felt engagement of cultural forms that were produced initially outside the United States. As i more on fully impact unpack in my book, the language was enforced through transnational forms of writing by nonconformal dissidents in the soviet east. All three writers emerged in the 1970s as a as kind of Global Human Rights icons. It was also brought into being from the circulation of testimonials of human rights abuses in latin america. They further defined in american human rights imaginary through the practices of military regimes in the violation of human rights. A development that entries out in some detail in the book, it argues to help argue for the ubiquitous presence of women of human rights as a moral language today. Physicists,tors, and professionals of all stripes found human rights in the 1970s and in many ways have never let go. Human rights are not deeply embedded in the curriculums of most professional schools from schools of medicine and law to business. Their proliferation of undergraduate and graduate programs in human rights at accredited universities with many graduates going out to work in what is now called the human rights field. Whether it be in government or other businesses. Human rights watch 400person staff and 69 million budget in 2014 is of a quite different order of magnitude than the skeleton of skeletal workforce and comparatively modest funding that fueled the activities of and the international in the 1970s. Even if the tactics and strategies are much the same as those pioneered by amnesty in that decade. The activities of Amnesty International in the 1970s. The spread of human rights into the fabric of contemporary American Society can often sometimes be quite remarkable. Some american fifthgraders in the United States spent as much time studying the universal declaration of human rights as they do mark twains tom sawyer as they prepare for various state examinations. The simple act of buying coffee or a piece of fish are now often mediated through Human Rights Concerns with fair trade and with slavers. Importantly, however, the American Vision of human rights 1970s looked outward rather than inward. Human rights abuses happened, for americans, some place outside the United States with very few exceptions the gay Rights Movement and indigenous Rights Movements are two human rights did not become the been forr as they have the u. S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s. Again as i discussed in my book, when the naacp went to court on a variety of human rights issues, u. N. Protected Global Human Rights along with u. S. Human rights norms along with u. S. Constitutional protections of rights were part of the arguments they made to judges and courts. The 1970s, or for that matter today, in most of the american contemporary social movements whether you look at occupy protests, the minimum Wage Movement or black , lives matter, the central driving optic of structural arguments about economics and not universal guarantees of Global Human Rights. That too seems to me is a legacy of the 1970s. Individual rights, the bodily integrity for victims of human rights abuses outside the United States, or at the center of american human rights imaginary in the 1970s as they are today. Jimmy carter, professional politics in washington, high diplomacy, more generally did , not set this in motion. It was bottom up and middle over, but it was not topdown. American amateurs were shaped by the global affects in the 1970s that made human rights believable in the United States. Those legacies shape our present Human Rights Movement. Moment. [applause] thank you, mark. We now invite you to join the conversation with mark. If you could please wait until the microphone reaches you, please state your name and affiliation, if you would like. Who goes first . Yes . All the way in the back. I am don with the woodrow Wilson Center. I guess i would quarrel with the thesis that somehow human rights was a european import in the u. S. In the 1970s. Im old enough to revert the remember the 1950s and 1960s when there was a great deal of concern for captive nations behind the iron curtain. That was something that was very given to me growing up in grade school and high school. We had the annual captive nations week that we observed in school. How do you deal with this in your book as far as those countries behind the iron curtain having to deal with concerns . S mr. Bradley it is a good question, and it is a hard question to answer quickly. Let me try to do it as quickly as i can in a way that will begin to satisfy the intention of it. In 25 minutes, it is hard to do a book that goes through two decades. Lingering on the 1970s and not talking so much about the 1940s part of the project i think that is the more helpful way of getting into the way you are going with the question. The argument i make in very encapsulated form about the 1940s is that it is the first moment that people begin to think about Global Human Rights. Yes, there are rights talk in america that go back to the founding if not before. There are a variety of ways to talk about collective rights at the international level. The focus in the 1940s is on the individual and the courseual having her beyond the nationstate as some kind of normative guarantees for political, civil, economic, and social rights. It seems like a fundamentally new topic as it emerges in the world war ii moment. As it comes out of world war ii, it is not entirely clear for a little while that there will be a cold war. Periods this liminal is really55 where it not certain what are the norms that will guide International Society in the postworld war ii moment. Human rights are one way that people might be rethinking how International Society would work. It is there with a whole constellation of things, terrorism, global policing, how much the u. N. Might be involved , and it is in that kind of liminal moment in the 1940s that you see engagement in this country with Global Human Rights. That is the moment that the naacp goes to human rights, japaneseamerican citizens groups do that, indigenous rights do that. By the early 1950s, it is pretty much off the table because there is a conservative reaction to the youth of global norms in the United States. There is an amendment in the early 1950s that ultimately makes dulles go to congress and say we are sorry, but we are , not going to do this anymore. This is not the way we want to think about the Global Human Rights question. I would argue that from that moment until you get to the 1970s, human rights as an alternative way to make intervention in the system is essentially in the pan. It does not mean that they do not become a weapon in the cold war. That the soviet union and the United States do not use human rights in one form or another in this ideological competition. If you wanted to do the parallel, soviets trying to raise the issue of the ways in which African Americans are treated in the United States. It is in play. It is being used as a particular kind of language, but i think advances whatat is an established cold war narrative. In the 1970s something is starting to break apart with that. What i want to do is create a kind of space to see this as something that may be connected to the cold war, but it is not driven and defined by the cold war. Something new that is opening up in this 1970s period. So i agree with you, but it does not preclude thinking about a later period as some kind of break or rupture. Thanks. I am from the university of connecticut. We have had conversations like this before. Thinking about some of the literature that is coming out i , am wondering if the 1970s is interregnum. Of gay examples you cite and lesbian Rights Movements and indigenous Rights Movement and much of the activism seems to take place in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s is focused on commercial and economic rights. Littleput the script a and ask why it is that mobilization and Movement Politics in some way, the politics of mobilization emanating from the United States and western europe focus on individual rights and moral witness testimony were as much of the rest of the world it is still a politics of global and social movements that may have particular figureheads such as Nelson Mandela yet, the particular politics of depoliticized politics becomes ascendant in the u. S. And western europe and relatively few other places in the world. I am wondering what would happen if rather than alexander solzhenitsyn being translated it was someone else who is novel focused on the trends of colonialism rather than soviet dissidents if that would have , gained traction in western europe and why books like that did not gain traction . So maybe the way of framing this is that why are the particular politics of individualism focused on individual rights and gain such deep traction as we think about rights in the United States and much less so in the rest of the world where collective vision of human rights continues to prevail through the 1970s . Mark bradley i never thought about putting him up against solzhenitsyn. I would much rather read those four volumes than the three of gulags. The gulags is 1800 pages. A lot of people had on their coffee tables in the 1970s, but im not so convinced that many people made it through the book and that in real detail. You know, this is a great question for me to think about at the end of a project, because, when i started to think about this book which was an embarrassingly long time ago, human rights history was in a somewhat different place. I initially imagined a project that would not lie down so fully in one place. I dont know that i imagined doing a global history of human rights politics, but maybe i was going to be down in three or four or five places. I tried to think about the ways in which local vernaculars were operating in different ways depending on where you were. I ultimately decided again, people figure out ways to give shape to the project going in all kinds of directions, remaining fixed in the United States made more sense than even trying to do it in a select number of places simultaneously. That may have been a mistake on my part, but in the end it seemed to me that what was going on especially in the 1970s was that it was a traveling language that was working in very different places in very different kinds of ways. When i was trying to do was simply capture the ways in which americans seemed to be making it their own. So in indonesia, they are thinking differently about how they might employ human rights. Both strategically and also in more substantive terms. One could do that for the new work that is coming out in latin america. Brazil, chile, and argentina. A variety of latin american actors making human rights their own. Sometimes thinking in economic and social terms. It seems to be one of the things that happened with human rights history is the kind of sweep of it let the locality go. Aboutf writing this was capturing the particular energies particularities in particular places. That is what it takes the focus that it does. It also seemed to me i think would share this too thinking not topdown i had to think about the middle. You cannot talk about dentists as the bottom up. They are the kind of middle. I had to think about this sort of dense middle that become sort of translators for this. This is true not only in the United States but different kinds of actors in a variety of places, as well. Thinking about how they are not just reflecting something but consciously making something as human rights politics begins to take a kind of shape and form. So again, yes other places and a , different set of local regulars, in this particular place again, not wanting to make list case United States but in this particular case, the importation of a set of ideas comes the United States and it is refracted through a variety of individualized american concerns. Gulag in reading moscow or new york in the mid1970s, you are reading that text in different kinds of ways. Part of it is trying to understand what are the lenses people are bringing to bear in texts that seem to be generative in one form or another. It does not surprise me that the other book is not in circulation in the United States in the 1970s. You have to get to at least the 1990s before thats kind of work is circulating more generally. Again, i would rather read the second one. Very good. Yes . The blue shirt . Thank you. I was wondering, usually when there is a big shift in Public Opinion or direction there are a , small number of seminal events that actually sets things going. Could you give us some examples in the 1970s that would have initiated this kind of thing . Mark bradley well, if you are trying to think one of the kind of vexed questions about human rights history has been what role does the holocaust play in moments where it defines human rights for people in a particular way. Before some of the new work had come out, there was an assumption that the reason that fore rights comes to the right after world war ii it had to be in some way a reaction to the holocaust. Most of the literature on the 1940s now argues that that probably was not the case. That the notion of holocaust memory, outside of the jewish community, was largely a product of a later period of time. So getting into the 1960s and the 1970s more generally. If that is so, then that way of thinking about testimony and moral witness again i think , it gets totally wrapped up into what people can hear about abuses happen, why abuse how abuses happen, why abuse matters, and why to mobilize about certain types of abuses. So, holocaust related programming has some of the largest audience numbers in American History. There were it was a galvanizing moment in terms of people thinking about this event in a broader way. The forms in which people thought about making rights claims and abuses. Indirectly it strikes me that Something Like that miniseries blows back into how people think about human rights abuses. The only found, and i talk about it a little in the book, goes directly to what was seen as one set of human rights abuses in the 1970s in chile was a film called missing. It is a collocated film and not all people particularly like it. It is partly because it shows american culpability in what was going on in chile with the fall of ali and a. The entire film is centered around a father and a wife tried to recover what has happened to their son husband. That is the only film i can point to in this early period that would have a direct human rights valence. And that even avoids the use of the word itself. In the book and talk, you did much to kind of reconstruct the way that human rights were understood and articulated. In particular, you emphasized the role of testimony and authentic testimony and experience in particular. There was a moment in the talk and the book where you raise a critique of this and you cite joan scott and her essay critiquing the concept of experience for its failure to interrogate the systems of power that create the experiences. You cite in the book amnesties amnesty and its disinterest in the conditions that create torture. You refer to this as a blind spot. Could be the brilliance of the concept. Prior to this moment, you have conservatives and leftists invoking human rights abuses, or what constitutes human rights abuses, for their ideological purposes. Here amnesty and others are explicitly saying that we are not going to get into that. Were calling attention to specific practices. In so doing, they enhance their own credibility so that they can attack the soviet union or indonesia or chile without regard to the political systems. They are not defending or attacking political systems they , are attacking the practices. They are not the only show in town. There are others that use this information with more partisan agendas that can place it into a context in which structures of power are very much a part of their critique. So what you call a blind spot, so could also be called as the very strength of what these folks are trying to do . Mark bradley you should work for Amnesty International. That was an impassioned defense of what amnesty is trying to do. Yes, it does all the things that you say it should do for amnesty in the 1970s. One of the things that amnesty is absolutely concerned about is impartiality. That is the raison detre of amnesty. That you are impartial individual groups that are adopting prisoners would do so ideally from the first world, the second world, and the third world so as to demonstrate that this impartiality went from top to bottom in the organization. In terms of making themselves credible and bringing people into amnesty as a practice of advocacy, it makes all kinds of sense. It seems to me that in retrospect, one could begin to argue that it turned human rights politics in various particular kinds of directions. Yes, other groups could take the information to use and put structure around, but it pioneered a way of thinking about human rights that essentially evacuated politics. That seems to me something that has continued in certain forms to the present day. For example, there is a brilliant article about truth condition coming out in latin america in the 1980s, 1990s, and the present era. Truth commissions were sort of captive to this narrative that there is no structure or politics. They had a difficult time explaining what the truth and reconciliation coming out of these commissions was. Instead, he says that there is only one sort of truth and Reconciliation Commission that goes deeper than sources of darkness and forces of light. And is the guatemalan truth reconciliation coalition. Coincidentally, he worked for a the guatemalan organization. The larger point he is trying to make is that a way of seeing emerges in the 1970s, and there are gains and losses with that. So, it is a blind spot. Whether that is entirely negative or positive is up for discussion. I think the problematics of it, one begins to see in a kind of human rights narrative and framework that moves into the present moment that is unwilling to think in terms of structure. I think it does, helpfully, understand why that i have often thought about this with black lives matter, that was the backdrop as i was writing this book. Human rights pops of here and again. It is a rhetorical tool. Largely entirely evacuated from what the politics of what one might argue is the nature of social movement in this country at the moment. Part of that is that evacuation that human rights made of structure is not working in certain ways for certain people. Again, there are gains and losses. In trying to understand why human rights does not become a resident of february for domestic problems in the United States, that seems to be one place you can go back to. Fascinating. Thank you. Yes . Sonja . Yes, i wonder how important the International Womens movement is to the book. You know about one of the slogans of the , american Womens Movement was that the personal is political. The emphasis on the political and individual experience as being the center of politics would sort of speak to your argument about new structure in feeling. Thereme time the was an outward attempt your argument that human rights are being imported in the u. S. , i am not sure from the perspective of the Womens Movement, im not sure if that was so true. Im thinking about the way that american feminists parted participated in the International Womens conferences from my own perspective as an american feminists at this time. Maybe i am blinded to it. It seems to me that there was a desire to be international on the part of american feminists, and that led to a lot of tensions, because one of the problems that was that feminists from other parts of the world said that their experience was not the same as ours. So there were debates about that. Do you address that at all in your book . Mark bradley i wish it played a larger role than it does in the book but it is there. The 1975 womens conference in mexico city things exactly about those kinds of dynamics. Dynamics about how a set of women in the global south at that moment the first world have very conflicting notions of what it might be to be a feminist in that time perio. D period. It is more gesturing to it than a sustained analysis, but in thinking about human rights as a kind of partial, provisional, and it should shifting language in the 1970s, so i do not want to come down that human rights has become a thing. There are parallels about the ways in which global feminism and human rights are presenting their cases. I think the notion of the individual and experience is a really central one. I also think there is a willingness to talk about in a structural way within the feminist movement that one does not see so much in the Human Rights Movement in that period of time. That is not to suggest that these movements or that the humanitarianism is the same thing as human rights, but one of the problems, i think, with a way that human rights history is being written is that Everything Else around it is sort of put to the side. So what happens when you put especially in the 1970s, it in combination with a variety of social movements going on globally . What is the same and what is different out of those . The turn to witness is there humanitarianism feminism, human is there with humanitarianism, feminism, and human rights. I think keeping human rights within a larger frame ultimately tells a larger story about how human rights came to matter to people. It came to matter in a constellation of things and not as a separate entity sort of floating through time. Thank you. The gentleman in the back . Gregory simkins. I am with the house subcommittee on africa. You mentioned the amendment from six decades ago as an attempt by the executive to put the brakes on u. S. Policy increasingly reflecting human rights. In the 1980s, there grew a cadre of members of congress who became strong advocates for human rights. Over the years, no matter who was president or what party was in control, pragmatism into either security or economic pragmatism carried the day, and still does. Those who promote human rights in the congress are considered naive. Not taking into account these issues. Moving forward, how do you see this tension being resolved, if it will be . Mark bradley well, as i said at the outset, my central actors are not the u. S. Congress or executive branch. But trying in a way to think about how human rights came to have a kind of purchase in Civil Society more generally. Which i think is the answer to either whether things will change or ultimately stay the same. I would argue that the reason human rights continues to sit there in some ways to play a role in how people think about morality really does have to do with this dense, professionalized network of people concerned about human rights that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. To me, the fact that human rights matters in the United States to the extent that it does rests largely on that Development Rather than the politics of washington at one moment or another. If i had finished this book before 9 11, one could have written a more hopeful conclusion. That somehow you know, the , 1990s moment . Suddenly, human rights was back. In the ways in which that liminal moments of the 1940s it occupied this political space. Post 9 11, post torture it was not as if in the 1970s the American Government was not culpable in the torture that was going on in latin america, it is just now more directly that the American Government was involved. In that post torture world, thats professionalized Human Rights Community cannot make the same kinds of arguments that they could. Or they could keep making the arguments, but they are just not heard in the way they might have been either domestically or internationally. I do not know what you do with that. I do not how it looks 10 years out from here. I do not know how the movement in some ways recovers from what happened in that moment in time, but that would seem to me in some ways crucial. This is where you fall back on the fact on the fact that i am a historian and not a clinical scientist. Political scientist. It is that kind of response i think. To me, i would look at Civil Society and not politics as politics. To think about, ultimately, where the very idea of human rights was likely to go in the United States. Thank you. Yes. Hi, my name is mindy cutler. I work on issues regarding asia, particularly japanese war crime. What comes to me i follow very carefully japanese denier history and rightwing politics in japan. If i understand correctly, your premise is that american human rights policy is witness based. If i am understanding that correctly. The focus of japanese rightwing denier history is the discrediting witnesses and going after people who are witnesses and people who write about the witnesses. They attack them in the press and physically. Everything in washington is political. Does that have any effect on our notion of human rights if the japanese are busy discrediting the chinese or koreans . Im not quite sure i am not having a very good question here but i am concerned that they understand that they need to attack the witness the japanese. Human rights. When it comes to human rights. Mark bradley i think i am understanding the intent of the question. They do that with varying levels of success, right . [inaudible] mark bradley but there is an National Audience as well. There it would seem to me with greater and lesser degrees of success. I guess i would say if you flip the question around, why is it so important for them to discredit witness . Is because witness became central to staking the claim. If you go back to nuremberg, that was not the way. It wasnt about individuals or victims, it was simply about documentation or perpetrators. In part it seems its a recognition of a fundamental transformation that then a conservative force would need to be back in one form or another. The fact they are uneven internationally is part of this arger process to suggest how the fact they are uneven internationally is part of this larger process to suggest how difficult it is to put witness at this point. That may be an over optimistic way of reading the question, but not to suggest the problems in japan it is a way of saying you dont spend so much time at it unless you believe that that is doing political work for you. Right . Thank you. Other questions . Microphone. My question is back to im sean mckale from George Washington university. It is not a question of itnessing and the way in which the go down to humanitarian, or down the human rights path. The humanitarian witnessing we can construct genealogy way back. Religious traditions and so forth to the present. Coming forward you see that developing with such organizations as doctors without borders. The whole purpose of humanitarian intervention is not to stall a political problem, it is to address human suffering. This one path you can take. Another path increasingly seems to dominate the american imagination, legalistic understanding. You take moral witnessing and try to take that and construct legal remedy, or in a sense the wrongs committed. My question as to what extent are you inflating witnesses humanitarian issues or purposes and that for human rights purposes . On conflating a lot. And consciously doing so. It is strange. I dont know how many people in the room know there was not a history of human rights until about 10 minutes ago. Its really the last decade or so that brought sustained historical interest in human rights. Its a young field and a field that has to define what it is about as it starts out. I think this is a come back to what i was saying earlier. You also have to wall off other things. It is not like internationalism. It is not about the cold war. It is something generous to itself. If something has been completely suppressed, you recover it in a way by pushing back layers in bringing it forward. That is a lot of of the first generation of writing about human rights authors are trying to do. It was not even mentioned in most accounts of post1945 International History at all. My sense is we are past that and the question is how do you put it back into a different story about the way in which post1945 International History actually worked . Yes, you can parse the boundaries between umanitarianism and human rights. There is another virtue of thinking about the constellation of meetings at the moment. In the 1970s, its very important and thinking about the kind of work that this new form of witness was doing. It is not just about public witnessing. It is also about a Nongovernmental Organization refashioning itself in the way it makes claims and who is an rbiter of truth. To come back to something i mentioned in the talk, in the 1950s you would think about a person, usually a white guy, it would be an arbiter of making a truth claim about one thing or another. Suddenly you have a situation in the 1970s where an assemblage of actors and a collectivity of one form or another to make those kinds of claims. They seem to have a kind of legitimacy in making a set of what people find to be persuasive truths. It seems like thinking about similarities rather than differences is an opportunity to think about the kind of larger meaning by which human rights could come to have a kind of legibility. I am a kind of camp that says yes, i understand differences but i think similarities are analytically getting is further right now. The next iteration of all this ay have to come back and parse these differences in ways that might be useful, but at the moment keeping them together seems analytically the most useful way of moving forward to me. Manda . Thanks. To follow up on the issue of National History center. The young the issue of similarities between human rights and humanitarianism, you talk about how your actors are involved in more than one of these movements. Are the dentists, the other organizations you study, other ndividuals are they as involved in humanitarian movements and human rights and International Feminism so that they are actually interrelated in the way people consider pursuing these different ovements and causes . Thats a really good question, amanda. Hard to disaggregate out a little bit from membership rolls and that sort of thing. What i would say i have a granular answer but im more confident with the kind of aggregate one. To some extent the kind of person who found themselves moved by this way of self presenting around political issues can be seen in the same kind of person that can be attracted to a variety of ields of intervention. Whether simultaneously a person can be intervening in the people cluster and why you come to human rights and not humanitarianism, feminism and not human rights, that the typical question to understand. People who are moving into all of those fields in the 1970s, a lot of them coming out of the american antiwar movement. With global feminism there was a direct connection from the 1970s. You dont need the on the via brits necessarily. It is a big bridge in a way. Why one gets to one and not the other on not so sure. The only way i have seen people parse out a version of that question in real historical time was there are a lot of tensions between Amnesty International and amnesty usa. Amnesty international dont like embassy usa all that much, they dont trust the americans. They write great memos were the head of amnesty says im not sure the americans know how to write politely to foreign powers. We need to instruct them particularly. These sort of tensions moved back and forth. The international sends out reps. Hey will do these tours of amnesty groups throughout the country. I found the notes that this woman who been sent from london who was here for several months and visited 47 groups across the country. She is assessing who was in the room, what they are talking about. Sometimes saying she is summarizing verbatim discussions. You dont know. There is no way of checking against it. One thing that comes out is these members themselves are selfconscious about who they are and how they are perceived. It is regional. Amnesty groups in utah or amnesty groups in the american south, of which there are fewer than there are on the coasts, talk about themselves and their Political Engagement in different kinds of ways than in california or connecticut or boston. Those groups in the south, the utah groups utah and colorado in my head, they dont map neatly on this kind of larger trajectory im talking about at all. On the coasts theres more of a kind of mapping and people subconsciously talking about a movement between things. The notion to empathizing, i think its all protean in the process of becoming. To even say what it meant to come into human rights, that would not be a fully formed concept. As people are talking about it in different places in the country, even with amnesty, they are talking about what that means in different kinds of ways and who their partners might be in different kinds of ways. Thank you. Let me note that amanda is the other from empire to humanity. We will be talking about her book in two weeks on november 7. Clear quickly running out of time. Please be sustained in your questions. I need a jones, American Historical Association retired. Just a simple question. How much of the study of human rights and the writing that has been done lately has filtered into the academy in the sense of graduate education and even undergraduate curriculum . Quite a lot actually. His is anecdotal and away. I run our Human Rights Center in chicago. I may not be the best person to ask because i tend to see if more than someone from the outside would. Might encounter but this is largely either Research Institutions or liberal arts colleges. I can speak to that end may be roader than that that is something i dont have as much familiarity with. In the liberal arts colleges it has to do with the fact i have two college aged kids and i been a colleges all over the country and obstruct every place i go by the fact there is some kind of sense of human rights and social justice, sometimes by historians and sometimes not. That is certainly true for Major Centers of human rights in the United States that often started as law school things. Law School Public policy was the initial centers. That broadened and deepened quite a bit, even in the schools that started it those places that now are larger liberal arts curriculum around human rights. There are a lot of graduate students whose primary discipline is their primary discipline. Maybe it is history or another discipline, but have come to see human rights is a useful framework for thinking that a particular historical problem. Sometimes that the actual history of human rights itself. Sometimes it is thinking in a kind of human rights frame to rethink an issue we would not have thought of in that way. I just read a fascinating thesis out of rutgers. Somebody working on anarchism and thinking about how human rights in fact may have been an important part of anarchist activist in the early part of the 20th century. You would not necessarily think that from the outset, but using it as a heuristic and think and push with. That is exciting to see, when its more than safely around the history of human rights. Humanitarianism, it has a deep history that goes way back, in some ways you dont see programs around humanitarianism. They tend to be programs that selfdescribed around human rights and maybe social justice, which is odd. I think what is going on in the history of humanitarianism is way more interesting than what we are doing in the history of human rights. From a disciplinary standpoint it seems to me richer and deeper work, other than my own book of course. [laughter] in general it does not have the kind of profile in some ways human rights has and that is a shame. The work is gotten so good in humanitarianism. Sarah . Thanks. Sarah snyder from american university. I have a few questions about the dentists. I wonder if they came to care about human rights on a sort of coprofessional basis, the way you have scientists. If they work through an association, the American Dental Association is not active on human rights. Are they acting as dentists . When orlof came from the soviet union the state of his chief was terrible. Are they doing forensic dental work or do they just happened to the dentist that are interested an active on human rights . Two minutes. Oddly it is both. They comes from this same tour i was talking but really of the british woman who comes. One of the things she is trying to do this with occupations. She makes them go around the room and say who are you. That is where i thought, my god, that are so many dentists in the room. It is around forensics that you start to see the engagement in a sustained way. The American Dental Association and the 1970s and 1980s is as far as ago, its not taking his up in any direct form. What you do see with professional group after professional group into the 1970s and 1980s is some kind of moment where they have to debate whether this is indeed ok to be part of our professional practice. I have not seen that within groups around dentists, but the ama have to do this, lawyers have to do this, all the major Scientific Association have prolonged debate about whether they can go there or they cant. They are often slowly resolved. But by the beginning of the 1980s, generally slowly resolved in favor of the fact that yes, some part of what we do in the world, the professional practice of human rights is ok that its a part of it. Its about how objective you should be. Science of the world or not of the world. Its a larger set of questions people are having around environmental questions too. It is not just professional groups rethinking human rights. For some its how much of an advocate can be around Environmental Issues or not. A larger sort of phenomenon about professional practice in this period. I have a feeling we go on for quite some time. These are Great Questions and a great discussion. Unfortunately i have to draw this to a close. I would invite you back next week when Tyler Anbinder will be speaking on his new book, city of dreams the 400 year epic history of immigrant new york. Please join us for reception outside this room. Thank you to our participants and thank you mark bradley. [applause] the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National able satellite corp. 2016] for our complete schedule two to cspan. Org. Each week american art facts takes you to museums to learn about American History. Located in virginia beach, virginia, the Aviation Museum is one of the largest collection of artifacts from world war i and world war ii. We went through the aviation hangar to learn about Pilot Training during the war. This is the first of a twopart series