Description
Book SynopsisHuman rights emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam trauma, Barbara Keys shows. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans looked outward for ways to restore their moral leadership. From world’s judge to world’s policeman was a small step, and intervention in the name of human rights because a cause both the left and right could embrace.
Trade ReviewReclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s is a vigorous and engaging account of the emergence of the concept and its non-linear journey from lip-serving political piety to an integral, if contradictory, component of the foreign policy of the U.S. -- Marilyn B. Young * Times Higher Education *
An accessible, searching study of an idea that seems to have been forgotten in favor of the steely, cost-cutting pragmatism of today. * Kirkus Reviews *
This timely, well-reasoned study demonstrates why Americans from across the political spectrum embraced international human rights as a foreign policy goal. * Publishers Weekly *
A genuine masterpiece of the historian’s craft,
Reclaiming American Virtue shows how human rights were a tonic for the country’s self-confidence. America’s fusion of moral principle and global violence in today’s world no longer looks the same after this revelatory book. -- Samuel Moyn, author of
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in HistoryThe most comprehensive account of a central issue of U.S. foreign policy during an exceptionally important decade,
Reclaiming American Virtue is clearly a major achievement. -- Lars Schoultz, author of
Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin AmericaToday, human rights and global interdependence are accepted as an essential basis for national and international affairs. Barbara Keys shows precisely when, where, and how this complete reconceptualization of America’s role in the world came about. A major contribution to the growing body of literature in human rights history. -- Akira Iriye, editor of
Global Interdependence: The World after 1945
