Human Rights and the World Wide Web

Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 22, No 2
April 2008

Internet Resources

Kathryn Smith

Online resources are helpful additions to any classroom lesson. Teachers can use these resources to refresh their knowledge on a subject or offer a new perspective while students might find online resources help them understand the lesson in class. Here are some helpful online resources for studying and teaching human rights.

In this issue, many of the contributors focus on civil rights in America, noting that civil rights are human rights. In Tom Jackson’s article, he mentions the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which can each be found at <http://www.historicaldocuments.com/ CivilRightsAct1964.htm > and <http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php? flash=true&doc=100>. These websites both include the primary texts, as well as contextual commentary and images of the documents themselves. Andrea McEvoy Spero mentions the Malcolm X Project in her bibliography <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ccbh/mxp/>, which is a useful site for biographical information as well as several multimedia resources. Spero also cites The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute homepage <http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/>.

African American worker’s rights are an important subtopic in any discussion of civil rights as human rights. Jackson mentions the 1959 Hospital Strike in his article. A 1959 Time article about the Hospital Strike tells is a good primary source <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,865915-1,00.html>. Michael Honey writes about African American working conditions during the 1960s, focusing mainly on the 1968 strike of black sanitation workers in Memphis. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has several pages dedicated to this strike. There is a page with general information and links to subpages <http://www.afscme.org/about/1029.cfm>. These subpages include a chronology of the strike, video of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking about labor, and articles from Public Employee magazine.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were important figures in the defining human rights in postwar America. Allida Black, director and editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, mentions the project’s website, which is a very useful resource for teaching about ER <www.gwu.edu/~erpapers>. ER’s writing is accessible for high school and college students. Spero mentions another useful ER-related website, which is the United Nation’s page on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights <http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html>. Another interesting article about the UN focuses on Latin America’s involvement in the UN’s beginnings. Borgwardt cites a useful FDR site. FDR’s “Annual Message to Congress, Jan. 6, 1941” can be found online at <http://www.americanrhetoric.com/ speeches/fdrthefourfreedoms.htm>. Additionally, an image of Rockwell’s The Four Freedoms can be found at <http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm142.html> and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum’s website is < http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/>.