The World Reimagined

"Operating at the intersection of diplomatic history and cultural analysis, this elegant study rewrites the history of how human rights language came to be a powerful yet ordinary vernacular for Americans. Bradley's approach is remarkably interdisciplinary, and his use of visual culture to analyze the affective call of human rights logic is utterly compelling. This book will transform how we think about the history of human rights and the limits of the US role in that history. [The World Reimagined] is a brilliant, field-defining work."
Melani McAlister, Chair, Department of American Studies, and Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs, George Washington University

"Mark [Philip] Bradley has written a luminous account of the human rights movement in America that draws on an astonishing array of material including photography and popular culture. [The World Reimagined] traces both the evolution and the limitations of human rights as the 'ubiquitous moral language' of the day. Beautifully written and powerfully argued, no other work on the subject comes close to this brilliant analysis."
Marilyn B. Young, New York University

"Mark Philip Bradley expands the boundaries of both American and human rights history in this luminous book, which provides extraordinarily compelling and fundamentally novel depictions of two different eras and how they relate across decades. With his trademark depth of mind and enviable subtlety, Bradley has achieved the most finely wrought and intellectually consequential history of America's place in the imagination of human rights ever composed. By turns absorbing and moving, it simultaneously brings the topic to a new level of sophistication and to the broadest of audiences."
Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, and author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History