Highlighting Ideas of Human Rights: A Review of American Intellectuals’ Classic Writings

Abstract

This article intends to review the ideas of human rights appearing in several American intellectuals’ classic writings from the Puritan era up to the modern era. It is a descriptive qualitative writing whose focus is on a literature review. In so doing, close reading is applied as a method and interdisciplinary perspective as its framework It is found that the ideas of human rights have spread as a public issue from the Puritan era until the modern era when proposed by many intellectuals, i.e., Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, James Madison, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, George Fitzhugh, Abraham Lincoln, Sarah Grimke, Louisa McCord, Margaret Fuller, Betty Friedan, William Lloyd Garrison, and so forth. In response to many inhumane social conditions in the United States, human rights ideas arose.The ideas certainly support the establishment of the United States as a country. Consequently, this fact indicates that human rights ideas have persisted in the veins of the American nation over time, preserving it as the most plural and multicultural one in which all entities are welcome and acknowledged.