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The Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies pp 345–356Cite as

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Human Rights as Cultural Globalisation: The Rise of Human Rights in Textbooks, 1890–2013

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Abstract

Human rights education (HRE) is now a much-lauded component of education worldwide but this was not always the case. In this chapter we briefly review HRE’s rise to international prominence and how it evolved to become a facet of mainstream curricula and education. We then proceed to provide an overview of common theoretical and methodological approaches as well as central themes in academic scholarship on HRE, with particular emphasis on school textbooks. Towards the end of the chapter, we turn to an under-studied aspect of the HRE phenomenon and a promising area for future research, namely, why HRE has become so prevalent worldwide. To this end, we present new empirical evidence documenting the expansion of human rights discussions in textbooks around the world throughout the course of the twentieth century.

The collection of the data used in this chapter was funded from a Spencer Foundation Grant (200600003).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Patricia Bromley

  2. University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Julia Lerch

Authors
  1. Patricia Bromley
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  2. Julia Lerch
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georg Eckert Institute - Leibniz-Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig, Germany

    Eckhardt Fuchs

  2. Georg Eckert Institute - Leibniz-Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig, Germany

    Annekatrin Bock

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Bromley, P., Lerch, J. (2018). Human Rights as Cultural Globalisation: The Rise of Human Rights in Textbooks, 1890–2013. In: Fuchs, E., Bock, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53142-1_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53142-1_25

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-53141-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53142-1

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