One of our favorite writers to write Human Rights History

Adam Hochschild loves the history of the underdog, of social movements that apparently come of out nowhere to successfully challenge entrenched ideas and power. We like these stories, too, but often, Hochschild says, they come to us as heroic ventures led by heroic people, who often are members of the upper class elite. Hochschild, a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine who will speak Monday at Duke, writes these histories with a different touch and finds the forgotten characters who played important parts. In King Leopold’s Ghost, it was Roger Casement and George Washington Williams who brought the world’s attention to Belgium abuses in the Congo. In his latest book on the British anti-slavery movement, Bury the Chains, he looks beyond the better-known story of aristocrat and abolitionist leader William Wilberforce (told last year in the movie “Amazing Grace”) to shed light on lesser-known characters such as Thomas Clarkson and a brilliant ex-slave named Olaudah Equiano.

In an interview last week, Hochschild talked about why these kinds of figures play such an important role in his histories and the success and failures of social movements.