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The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, vol. 1: The Human Rights Years, 1945-1948. Ed. by Allida Black. (New York: Thomson Gale, 2007. lxiv, 1121 pp. $120.00, isbn 978-0-684-31576-8.)
Because of the work of such historians as Blanche Wiesen Cook, we now possess a deeper understanding of Eleanor Roosevelt's public career before 1945, from her involvement in social justice feminism to her advocacy of civil rights. With the significant exception of Mary Ann Glendon's 2001 study, A World Made New, however, Roosevelt's career after World War II remains relatively unexamined. This book, the first of a planned series of five volumes covering Roosevelt's public life until her death in 1962, is a superb collation of primary sources of the period between April 1945 and December 1948, which culminated in Roosevelt's critical work in securing the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the General Assembly of the United Nations (un).
The editor Allida Black, who wrote the excellent 1996 Roosevelt biography, Casting Her Own Shadow, and previously edited two collections of Roosevelt's writings (What I Hope to Leave Behind, 1995, and Courage in a Dangerous World, 1999), states in the introduction that this first volume "presents a representative selection" of how the former First Lady defined, implemented, and promoted human rights and how her work possessed an influence both in the United States and abroad (p. xlii). Black further explains that her staff spent six years culling the 410 documents published in this volume from more than 600 collections...