human rights 
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SOURCE: New York Times
4/11/2021
How Should the US Treat Migrants when American Policy Affected the Countries They Fled?
The Temporary Protected Status designation, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States, originated because of the massive human rights abuses of the US-supported dictatorship in El Salvador.
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4/11/2021
Holocaust Remembrance 80 Years After the Beginning of Hitler's Campaign of Genocide
by Rick Halperin
We must see our lives as inextricably linked to both the past and future, so that all peoples, individually or collectively, do not have to know of a world with genocide.
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SOURCE: National Security Archive
3/23/2021
Argentina’s Military Coup of 1976: What the U.S. Knew
Newly declassified documents demonstrate that the US government, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were aware of the developing coup and evaluated policy as a balancing of the prospective military dictatorship's friendliness to the US against its likely willingness to commit human rights violations.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/17/2021
The Princeton Historian Mugged by Reality
Xiyue Wang was released from an Iranian prison in 2019 after being detained for four months. The Princeton doctoral student is now a critic of softening American sanctions aginst Iran.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
3/11/2021
Joe Biden is Making Clear that Saudi Human Rights Violations Won’t be Ignored
by Nicholas DeAntonis
President Biden's recent affirmation of an American commitment to human rights in discussions with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud fell short of many demands for action against the Saudi regime. But it is a step in reforming a relationship in which human rights have not been an afterthought, but a non-thought.
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3/7/2021
The Return of Human Rights on the American Agenda?
by Richard Moe
One of Jimmy Carter's legacies, albeit erratically observed, has been the assertion of human rights as a foreign policy priority. After four years of ignoring the issue, will the US under Joe Biden reclaim leadership in high-stakes relationships with Russia and Saudi Arabia?
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SOURCE: Journal of the History of Ideas
10/7/2020
With a Touch of Wisdom: Human Rights, Memory, and Forgetting
by Antoon de Baets
A historian concerned with memory, censorship and human rights considers whether there is an affirmative duty for historians to promote the memory of crimes and atrocities.
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SOURCE: The Asia-Pacific Journal
2/23/2021
Supplement to Special Issue: Academic Integrity at Stake: The Ramseyer Article
by Alexis Dudden
The Asia-Pacific Journal is publishing a collection of letters in opposition to the controversial article by Harvard Law professor J. Mark Rameseyer which characterized the sexual abuse of Korean women during World War II as freely contracted sex work.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
2/16/2021
Whose Rights Matter in Pandemic America?
by Liz Theoharis
In Cold War America, political movements that challenged the oppression of poverty were suppressed in favor of the formal ideal of civil rights. A leader of the revived Poor People's Campaign first envisioned by MLK before his death says that history must be addressed and undone.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/18/2021
For Generations, African Americans Have Led Global Antiracist Movements
by Brenda Gayle Plummer
International organizations in the 20th century provided space for people from the developing world and African American activists to come together in movements that merged opposition to colonialism with demands for domestic civil rights.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
2/16/2021
Harvard Law Prof Rejects Historical Consensus on ‘Comfort Women,' Historians Respond
"There has been so much scholarship produced in the 30 years since the first survivor came forward and it’s almost as if Professor Ramseyer's decision is to just ignore all of the debate -- as if he’s the first person to come into this," said Alexis Dudden, an expert on modern Japanese and Korean history.
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SOURCE: Harvard Crimson
2/15/2021
Journal Delays Print Publication of Harvard Law Professor’s Controversial ‘Comfort Women’ Article Amid Outcry
"Against the historical consensus, Ramseyer claims in his paper, entitled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War," that comfort women were not coerced and instead voluntarily entered into contracts with Japanese brothels."
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2/14/2021
How Abraham Lincoln Can Inspire Peace for Yemen
by William Lambers
The postwar "friendship train" campaign involved Americans personally in delivering food to the hungry in Europe, and symbolized the nation's larger commitment to the Marshall Plan. A similar broad effort could help advance the policies needed to end the humanitarian crisis of war and starvation in Yemen.
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SOURCE: CNN
1/12/2021
Israeli Rights Group: Nation Isn't a Democracy but an "Apartheid Regime"
B'Tselem declared that "the traditional view of Israel as a democracy operating side-by-side with a temporary Israeli occupation in the territories 'imposed on some five million Palestinian subjects ... has grown divorced from reality'." The Israeli embassy in London dismissed the finding.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
12/13/2020
Why Jimmy Lai and Hong Kong’s Democracy Advocates Need Biden’s Public Support Right Now
by Natan Sharansky
A former Soviet political prisoner and human rights advocate calls on the Biden transition team to make clear that the new president will not accept China's repression of democracy in Hong Kong.
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12/13/2020
Seven Years from the "Day of Infamy" to "Human Rights Day"
by Rick Halperin
"As 2020 comes to a close, even in the midst of a terrible pandemic which may claim 300,000 U.S. deaths by year’s end, we would do well to pause and reflect upon how much progress has been made, and still needs to be made, in the struggle for human rights."
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SOURCE: National History Center and Woodrow Wilson Center
12/3/2020
Washington History Seminar: Mira Siegelberg on "Statelessness: A Modern History" (Monday, Dec. 7)
The Washington History Seminar and the Woodrow Wilson Center host Mira Siegelberg for a discussion of her book "Statelessness: A Modern History" on Monday, Dec. 7 at 4:00 PM.
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SOURCE: Rolling Stone
11/19/2020
The Untouchables: An Investigation into the Violence of the Chicago Police
by Paul Solotaroff
Historian Simon Balto is among experts who place the Chicago Police Department's treatment of the city's Black communities in historical perspective.
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SOURCE: Africa is a Country
11/3/2020
Africa's Forgotten Refugee Convention
by Marcia C. Schenck
The Organization of African Unity proposed its own refugee convention in 1969, reframing the issue as one of solidarity rather than crisis, and pointing the way to a more humane and positive model of thinking about the problems of displacement and statelessness.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
11/10/2020
How the World Gave Up on the Stateless (Review)
Over 10 million people are stateless today, and governments seem hell-bent on increasing their numbers. A new book examines how the rise of modern states created the dire circumstance of statelessness.
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