Describe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ongoing global challenges, and synthesize the course's major themes from the Enlightenment to the present.
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), drafted by a committee that included Eleanor Roosevelt, proclaiming that rights to life, liberty, free speech, and freedom of religion, among many others, belong to all people simply because they are human, regardless of nationality or any government's recognition. Look closely and you can see this course's very first week reflected directly in its very last: the UDHR is a direct descendant of Locke's 1689 natural-rights theory, now declared as a global, if imperfectly enforced, standard rather than one philosopher's argument. Human rights movements ever since -- from civil rights struggles to women's rights movements to the anti-apartheid campaign you studied two weeks ago -- have drawn on exactly this framework to make their case.
The world today faces genuine, ongoing challenges: terrorism and security concerns reshaped global politics after the attacks of September 11, 2001; climate change presents a genuinely global collective-action problem that no single nation can solve alone; refugee crises continue to test both international institutions and individual nations' willingness to help; and rapid technological change, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology, raises new ethical questions that laws and institutions are still catching up to. Looking back across this entire course, one throughline connects nearly every week: an ongoing, unfinished argument over who holds rights, who holds power, and how a society balances the two -- an argument that began long before 1750, that ran through revolutions, industrialization, nationalism, empire, two world wars, genocide, a cold war, and decolonization, and that has not ended. You inherit that argument now, as this year's next chapter waits to be written.
Mastery looks like: They can explain the direct link between Locke's natural-rights theory and the UDHR, name at least one current global challenge, and articulate the course's throughline in their own words.
Common stumbles: Treating the course's 36 weeks as a list of disconnected facts and dates rather than recognizing the single, ongoing argument over rights and power that connects the Enlightenment to today.