This week, the 74th session of the General Assembly of the United Nations began in New York.

To mark the occasion, we wanted to pay tribute to one of the most important and meaningful accomplishments of that body – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Adopted at the 3rd UN General Assembly held in Paris –this document -- As Ken Burns notes in The Roosevelts --was history’s first attempt at laying out the principles under which all nations should behave towards their own citizens and as well as towards each other.

It was largely the work of one delegate from the United States, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. 

This week we put Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the Words Matter Library.

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