Barbara J. Keys is currently writing a book, under contract with Simon & Schuster in the US, about Henry Kissinger’s efforts to craft and defend his reputation over the last half-century.
She is the author of Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2014), which won the University of Melbourne Woodward Medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The book argues that the American commitment to international human rights emerged in the 1970s not as a logical outgrowth of American idealism but as a surprising response to national trauma. Reclaiming American Virtue situates this novel enthusiasm as a reaction to the profound challenge of the Vietnam War and its tumultuous aftermath. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans on the right and the left alike looked outward for ways to restore America’s moral leadership. [Buy on Amazon]
- “Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s is a vigorous and engaging account of the emergence of the concept and its non-linear journey from lip-serving political piety to an integral, if contradictory, component of the foreign policy of the U.S.”—Marilyn B. Young, Times Higher Education
- “An accessible, searching study of an idea that seems to have been forgotten in favor of the steely, cost-cutting pragmatism of today.”—Kirkus Reviews
- “This timely, well-reasoned study demonstrates why Americans from across the political spectrum embraced international human rights as a foreign policy goal.”—Publishers Weekly
- “A genuine masterpiece of the historian’s craft, Reclaiming American Virtue shows how human rights were a tonic for the country’s self-confidence. America’s fusion of moral principle and global violence in today’s world no longer looks the same after this revelatory book.”—Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s (Harvard University Press, 2006) is a transnational study of the emergence of international sports competitions as a significant political and cultural force in the 1930s. It won six prizes, including the Myrna Bernath Book Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the best book award of the North American Society for Sport History. [Buy on Amazon]
The Ideals of Global Sport: From Peace to Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) explores the widely held views that international sports competitions like the Olympic Games promote peace, mutual understanding, international friendship, nondiscrimination, and, more recently, human rights. The book won the 2017-2019 Australian Society for Sports History Anthology Prize. [Buy on Amazon]
Other book projects include a book manuscript on anti-torture campaigns since 1945, titled “Broken Dreams: Anti-Torture Campaigns and Global Human Rights since 1945,” which is based on research in eight countries and four languages.