United Nations History

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a landmark document in the history of human rights, and Eleanor Roosevelt played a significant role in its development. The UDHR was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, in Paris. It was drafted by representatives from different legal and cultural backgrounds, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a “mania.” In Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza—a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes.

America is a smuggler nation. Our long history of illicit imports has ranged from West Indies molasses and Dutch gunpowder in the 18th century, to British industrial technologies and African slaves in the 19th century, to French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th century, to Mexican workers and Colombian cocaine in the modern era. Contraband capitalism, it turns out, has been an integral part of American capitalism.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations has influenced economic thinkers for generations. Smith was a firm believer that the economic progress of any nation was tied to free trade and the division of labor.

The American Revolution was not only a political contest for liberty, equality, and independence (for white men, at least); it was also a contest to define certain accounts of reality to be truthful while defining others as false and dangerous. Misinformation Nation argues that we must also conceive of the American Revolution as a series of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and uninformed overreactions.

Benjamin Franklin was more than just a Founding Father of the United States—he was a visionary, a scientist, a diplomat, and an intellectual giant whose legacy continues to shape the world today. In The Architect of a Nation: Unveiling the Legacy of Benjamin Franklin, Arley Ballenger provides a comprehensive and captivating biography of this extraordinary figure, exploring how Franklin's ideas, inventions, and diplomacy helped forge the United States into the nation it is today.

குமுதம் ரிப்போர்டரில் வெளியான அமெரிக்காவின் அரசியல் வரலாறு. யுத்தங்களை வருமானத்துக்குரியதொரு உபாயமாக நீண்டகாலமாக அமைத்துக்கொண்டு செயல்படும் தேசம் அமெரிக்கா. அதன் பளபளப்புக்குப் பின்னால் இருக்கும் குப்பைகளும் ஜனநாயகத்துக்குப் பின்னாலுள்ள சர்வாதிகாரமும் செழுமைக்குப் பின்னாலுள்ள கடன்சுமைகளும் மிக முக்கியமான விஷயங்கள். இந்நூல், அமெரிக்காவின் முழுமையான அரசியல் வரலாற்றை விவரிப்பதினூடாக அத்தேசத்தின் நிஜமுகத்தைக் காட்சிப்படுத்துகிறது.

In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was 90 percent white, 10 percent African American, with a little more than 100 families who were "other". Currently the African American percentage of the population is about the same, but the Anglo white population is less than 50 percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. A Nation of Nations follows the lives of a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually "Americanize".

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE WINNER OF THE 2025 ZÓCALO BOOK PRIZE A humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we...

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America's defining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. In 1780, Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line's history. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland-Pennsylvania borderlands, but now African Americans faced a boundary between distinct legal regimes.

Building a New Nation chronicles the development of the new government following the signing of the Constitution. It explores the political views of the young nation’s leaders as they struggled to form a strong nation, despite the foreign and domestic dilemmas that they faced. The authors describe the beginnings of the two-party system, the administrations of the first three presidents, and key decisions by each branch of the government that shaped the future of the country.

John Adams told Thomas Jefferson that “history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” Thomas Edison called him “the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible.” He was a founder of both the United States and the French Revolution. He invented the phrase, “The United States of America.” He rose from abject poverty in working-class England to the highest levels of the era’s intellectual elite. And yet, by the end of his life, Thomas Paine was almost universally reviled.

2021: As the centennial of one of the nation's worst race massacres approached, citizens of Tulsa faced the prospect with hope and dread. Hope that the anniversary would show Tulsa had changed since that day, when a white mob left the city's thriving African American Greenwood neighborhood a smoldering ruin. Dread that Tulsa's faults would be exposed as never before, its racism reinforced rather than mitigated. The anniversary was even more fraught than expected.

The first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency are justly famous, viewed as a period of political action without equal in American history. Yet as historian David B. Woolner reveals, the end of FDR's presidency might very well surpass it in drama and consequence. Drawing on new evidence, Woolner shows how FDR used every ounce of his diminishing energy to pursue the things that mattered most to him: the establishment of the United Nations, the reinvigoration of the New Deal, the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and more.

John Ross served the Cherokee Nation in a public capacity for nearly fifty years, thirty-eight as its constitutionally elected principal chief. Historian W. Dale Weeks describes Ross's efforts to protect the tribe's interests amid systematic attacks on indigenous culture throughout the nineteenth century. At the outset of the Civil War, Ross called for all Cherokees to remain neutral in a war they did not support—a position that became untenable when the US withdrew its forces from Indian Territory.

Many hands have built our great nation, and many of them have come far from home to do it. I'd like you to please discover more about how migration has helped shape modern America. America’s history is rich with the stories of brave people with big dreams who have come here searching for opportunities—and in doing so, they’ve helped to shape both our economy and our culture. What drove these people? What challenges did they face along the way? There’s so much more to American history than the history books have told you.

In the two decades before the Civil War, free Americans engaged in history wars every bit as ferocious as those waged today over the proposed National History Standards or the commemoration at the Smithsonian Institution of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In One Nation Divided by Slavery, author Michael F. Conlin investigates the different ways antebellum Americans celebrated civic holidays, read the Declaration of Independence, and commemorated Revolutionary War battles.

In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar Miriam Pawel weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead 140 years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance.

This audiobook begins with a look at the ancient Israelites, Greeks, and Romans - as well as medieval feudalism and Calvin's Geneva, in laying the moral foundations for both feudal Virginia and Puritan New England. It looks at some early spiritual wanderings...and a great awakening that brought American back on course - in time to fend off a British effort to end America's spirit of independence. It covers the creation of the new republic, the growing divide over slavery, and the civil war that followed.