Human Rights in the Age of Revolutions

Catalog description

This seminar is designed as both as an introduction to the question of the origins of the idea of human rights and as an opportunity to develop a sustained research project related to the Age of Revolutions in Europe, the Americas (North or South), or Caribbean, mid-18th century to 1848. Topics to be discussed include: the relationship and tension in Enlightenment thought between equality and liberty, the idea of “the rights of man” and its exclusions, the emergence of abolitionism in the context of slave societies, the roots of feminism, the problem of the poor and the question of social and economic rights, rights and national self-determination, and left- and right-wing critiques of rights language. Primary source readings will range from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, to 18th-century slave codes, to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jeremy Bentham. Secondary source readings will introduce students to interpretative problems in thinking about human rights in the context of the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions. Throughout the seminar, emphasis will also be placed on the development of a historical research project, including framing a question, building a bibliography, analyzing various kinds of sources, constructing an effective outline, and writing an argument-driven and well substantiated seminar paper. **Note for History Majors and Minors: if your research paper addresses a Latin American/Caribbean or US topic, then you may use this course to fulfill that particular geographic requirement.