Mark Philip Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmidt Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as the Faculty Director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and Chair of the Committee on International Relations. He is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, and Vietnam at War (2009). He is the coeditor of Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley is also the former President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

• Introduction: how it feels to be free; Part I. The 1940s: 1. At home in the world; 2. The wartime rights imagination; 3. Beyond belief; 4. Conditions of possibility; Part II. The 1970s: 5. Circulations; 6. American vernaculars I; 7. American vernaculars II; 8. The movement; Coda: the sense of an ending.

'This is a magnificent and much-needed book on how the United States has wrestled with the global human rights imagination in the twentieth century. Bradley's history provides an essential discussion of the background for some of the critical issues in today's international human rights regime.' O. A. Westad, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University