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Origins of the Universal Declaration of 1948

Core reading

Stephen P. Marks, ‘From the “Single Confused Page” to the “Decalogue for Six Billion Persons”: The Roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the French Revolution’, Human Rights Quarterly 20: 3 (1998), 459-514.

Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom in the Twentieth Century, ch. 4, “1948: Human Rights”.


Further reading

John P. Humphrey, Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure (New York, 1984).

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge, 2013).

Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Univ. of Penn., 1999).

Johannes Morsink, Inherent Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration (Univ. of Penn., 2009).

Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York, 2001).

Mary Ann Glendon, ‘The Forgotten Crucible: The Latin American Influence on the Universal Human Rights Idea’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 16: 2 (2003), 28-39.

Jeremy Carroza, ‘From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly no. 25 (2003), 281-313.

Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, William I. Hitchcock, (eds.), The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford, 2012).

William Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, 1898-1945 (Stanford, 2007).