Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Human rights as history / Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde -- The recent history of human rights / Kenneth Cmiel -- The Holocaust and the "human rights revolution" : a reassessment / G. Daniel Cohen -- "Constitutionalizing" human right : the rise and rise of the Nuremberg principles / Elizabeth Borgwardt -- Human rights and the laws of war : the Geneva Convention of 1949 / William I. Hitchcock -- Grams, calories, and food : languages of victimization, entitlement, and human rights in occupied Germany, 1945-1949 / Anita Grossmann -- Are women "human"? : the UN and the struggle to recognize women's rights as human rights / Allida Black -- Imperialism, self-determination, and the rise of human rights / Samuel Moyn -- "The first right" : the Carter Administration, Indonesia, and the transnational human rights politics of the 1970s / Brad Simpson -- Anti-torture politics : Amnesty International, the Greek junta, and the origins of the human rights "boom in the United States / Barbara Keys -- From the center-right : Freedom House and human rights in the 1970s and 1980s / Carl J. Bon Tempo -- "For our Soviet colleagues" : scientific internationalism, human rights, and the Cold War / Paul Rubinson -- Principles overwhelming tanks : human rights and the end of the Cold War / Sarah B. Snyder -- The right to bodily integrity : women's rights as human rights and the international movement to end female genital mutilation, 1970s-1990s / Kelly J. Johnson -- Is history a human right? : Japan's and Korea's troubles with the past / Alexis Dudden -- Approaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights / Mark Philip Bradley.