The Eleanor Roosevelt Project:
The Human Rights Years (1945-1962)

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, a Chartered Research Center of The George Washington University, is an effort to collect, annotate, and publish documents related to Eleanor Roosevelt's human rights work in print and electronic format, so that it will be accessible to scholars around the world, to teachers and students in a wide variety of settings, and to those actively engaged in defining human rights in their own time. The project is directed by Allida Black, Research Professor of History and International Affairs, and is located on the university's Mount Vernon Campus.

The documentary editions

After completing an exhaustive search of more than 500 archives at home and around the world, the project will publish five highly selective, annotated volumes chronicling Eleanor Roosevelt's postwar human rights work. In the process, the project will compile the most comprehensive archive of material related to Eleanor Roosevelt's political work ever assembled.1 Documents selected for the editions will include letters, reports, articles, columns, speeches, petitions, etc. written by Eleanor Roosevelt; radio and televisions shows on which she appeared; commercials she made for candidates and policies; excerpts from her books and debates; and committee hearings in which she participated; as well as the material she received that helped her develop the positions she took.

Columbia University Press will publish the letterpress edition. The project will also mount a more comprehensive, throughly indexed but sparsely annotated, electronic edition to be hosted on its Web site (www.gwu.edu/~erpapers). Staff anticipates that Volume One will be published in 2005.

Other projects

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers is committed to taking the material to as many communities as possible in as many forms as possible. Working with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, we developed an electronic exhibit for the Eleanor Roosevelt Gallery. In collaboration with the National Council on History Education, we have given workshops for secondary school teachers in three states. With the support of the National Park Foundation, we developed the "Teaching Eleanor Roosevelt" Web curriculum for the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site (www.nps.gov/elro/home.htm) connecting her life to the issues addressed in the history Standards of Learning for New York State. We are frequent visitors to secondary, university, and law school classrooms and organization meetings around the metropolitan Washington area. We also provide information on Eleanor Roosevelt and/or the evolution of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to members of Congress, the United Nations, print and electronic media, scholars, policy institutes, and documentary film makers.