Abstract
This entry describes certain key issues around civil rights, primarily involving the contestation in law, politics, and popular culture about their scope. The entry covers broad historical ground with a predominant focus on civil rights in the post-Revolutionary United States, including discussions of slavery and the role that literature played in undergirding the development of an anti-slavery rights consciousness. It also engages the ambivalence about the extension of rights to freed slaves in the aftermath of the US Civil War before addressing the evolution of the legal framework regarding the appropriate site of rights enforcement. It addresses the role that World War II, and other significant developments in the middle of the twentieth century have played in the expansion of a rights culture across the globe. It ends with a discussion of criticisms of rights and rights-talk.