Last spring, the Penn Humanities Forum sponsored "A Celebration of Philadelphia Writers," a two-day immersion in the city's rich literary past and its exuberant present. This year, we propose a different investigation, less light-hearted perhaps, but fundamental to all of us who live in this birthplace of American freedoms. After two terms of speakers and seminars on our 1999-2000 theme, "Human Nature," the Forum invites you to explore the great struggles for human rights that mark recent history.

In 1948, the United Nations issued its "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," a document urging tolerance and respect for the "dignity and worth of the human person." This stirring instrument of international law reflected the pain of World War II, in which, as the Declaration states, "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind." In an effort to prevent such atrocities in the future, the Declaration announced "the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want-proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people." Outlawing slavery and servitude, torture and degradation, arbitrary arrest and exile, the UDHR proclaims everyone's rights to family, property, equality before the law, and freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. These and other rights form the background to political and legal reform in our day.

Moved as we are by these principles, however, we seldom consider the picture of human nature from which they proceed. The insistence on the universality of rights depends on the belief that we are all "members of the human family," requiring security, freedom, employment, and education in order to be fulfilled. This idea of human nature is not a given. Even in cultures that invented our freedoms-Periclean Greece, for example, or the England of the Magna Carta—it would have seemed quite astonishing to assert that some groups-for example, women, foreigners, peasants, slaves, or homosexuals-were fully "human" and that all were equally entitled to the same rights. Even in our day, those who have suffered discrimination are suspicious of the phrase "human nature," since it has been used so often to suggest that those who deviate from an accepted norm are not properly human and hence not entitled to the same protections and privileges as the rest. As George Orwell might have put it, when it comes to human nature, some people have always been more equal.

In this week of lectures, films, performances, walking tours, and televised documentaries, each day will be devoted to a different human rights issue: the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, Women's Rights, the Holocaust, the Balkans and Islam, and Africa. Our final day focuses on Philadelphia as a historic for the enunciation and defense of human rights, and sometimes, for their violation. In the spirit of free interchange, inquiry, and enjoyment, we urge you to join us in this program.