Two of the most pressing questions facing international historians today are how and why the Cold War ended. Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War explores how, in the aftermath of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, a transnational network of activists committed to human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe made the topic a central element in East-West diplomacy. As a result, human rights eventually became an important element of Cold War diplomacy and a central component of détente. Sarah B. Snyder demonstrates how this network influenced both Western and Eastern governments to pursue policies that fostered the rise of organized dissent in Eastern Europe, freedom of movement for East Germans and improved human rights practices in the Soviet Union - all factors in the end of the Cold War.

In honor of the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the United Nations (UN) General Assembly (GA) unanimously decided to designate 1968 the International Year for Human Rights (IYHR). The UN encouraged its member states to observe the year with postage stamps, pamphlets on the declaration, radio programming, and human rights prizes, hoping that such celebrations of the UDHR would bring greater adherence to its articles. Within the United States, efforts to mark the year had limited impact, reflecting the UN's lack of salience within the United States in these years. Examining U.S. commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the UDHR, which has not yet received sufficient attention, illuminates the complicated politics of 1968 in the United States and offers a window into the evolution of human rights activism in the United States between the late 1940s and late 1970s. In 1968, attention to human rights was still episodic rather than sustained, as it would come to be in later years through the efforts of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), members of Congress, and State Department officials.U.S. observance activities of the IYHR represented the tail end of 1940sinspired activism. When an IYHR was first proposed in 1963, U.S. human rights activism remained shaped by the personalities, institutions, and approaches that were prominent in debates over the UN and international protection of human rights in the late 1940s. U.S. advocacy was geographically rooted in New York, focused on influencing UN institutions, and the purview of a small group of elite activists. By the mid-1960s human rights activism was beginning to shift to broader-based movements that criticized U.S. support for repressive regimes, such as the campaign against the *The author expresses her appreciation to

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