Opinions Throughout History: Civil Rights

Civil rights are the rights and freedoms granted by law to members of a civil society, laws that protect against discrimination and guarantee equal treatment within the legal system. In the 1950s and 1960s in the Unites States, there was a nationwide conflict, as Americans fought to expand the protections of the law to those who had, to that point, been marginalized and exploited. This battle became one of the most famous and admired periods in all of American history, but it was but one saga in a conflict ongoing since long before the American experiment began. Tracing the roots of the civil rights movement from the Colonial era to modern times, this volume of Opinions Throughout History looks at how perceptions of essential concepts like liberty, equality, race, gender, and nationality have evolved. This volume also explores how the value of the civil rights movement itself, and of its greatest leaders, have changed over time.