Kathryn Sikkink— Sometimes we get so enamored with our rights that we forget about our corresponding responsibilities. In order to fully realize our own rights and the rights of others, we also need to embrace and practice responsibilities. For example, people in the United States like to think they have
Beth Barton Schweiger— The power of literacy’s hold on the modern imagination cannot easily be measured. One way to begin to comprehend it is to pose a question: who is against it? From local school boards to Capitol Hill to the United Nations General Assembly, the consensus that literacy empowers
Human rights are universal. They belong to everyone, as the term implies. But the movement for human rights is a story grounded in particulars: a time, a place, a group of people. That story is told, brilliantly and for the first time, in Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in
Bruce Ackerman— Begin on an optimistic note: Americans of the twenty-first century are much better equipped for citizenship than their counterparts were at the dawning of the Progressive era. About 10 percent of young Americans graduated high school in 1910; it was almost 80 percent a century later. The length
Welcome to our weekly roundup of news from university presses! Once again, there is a lot to share this week from our fellow academic publishing houses and much to learn on What SUP at the social university presses. This week, we considered presidential approaches to human rights, learned about current
Looking ahead to September’s Political Economy theme on the Yale Press Log, this month we celebrate the one-year publication anniversary of two powerful books from Yale University Press: Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen and Donna Hicks’s Dignity. On the surface, these authors have established themselves in very different niches of the
Ivan Lett— Here in New Haven, the memory of La Amistad and its historic court trial pervades the memory of our coastline. Popular recreations of the slave ship’s story, such as the 1997 Spielberg film or the ship replica at Mystic Seaport, remind us of the horrors of slavery and
Ivan Lett It is now 65 years to the day that the United Nations held its first General Assembly in London. In the aftermath of World War II, the Allies met repeatedly to establish the goals of the organization, notably its commitment to international peace and cooperation. Fifty-one nations were
Adam LeBor’s new book “Complicity with Evil” – The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide was published in the US and UK in November 2006. It is a controversial, powerful and thought-provoking book which asks important questions about the legacy of the United Nations under Kofi Annan and