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The language of human rights can be found all around us, as a legal framework, political discourse, and method of interpreting justice and liberation. Much of this language invests human rights with a unique scale of political and intellectual power, opening up a range of questions. Can human rights accomplish justice? How are they enforced? What does it mean to support human rights? In order to answer these contemporary questions it helps to start from some historical ones. Where did human rights come from? What is a human right? Who decides and does it matter? Recently, scholars, including historians and lawyers, have revived attempts to chart the historical development of human rights as a discrete project. Those histories have diverged in the power and intellectual weight they attribute to human rights as well as the basic chronology of human rights as a discourse. This class will provide a survey of these histories and in the process attempt to introduce students to historiography as a method as well as provide insight into the structure and function of the modern human rights project.