Taking liberties abroad

This dissertation examines American grassroots participation in transnational humanitarian advocacy networks from the Greek Revolution of the 1820s to the First World War. By tracing the development of varied mobilizations in defense of "humanity"--from efforts to protect Ottoman Christians and Eastern European Jews, to campaigns against African slavery, to support for Russian political dissidents--it offers an historical framework for understanding the evolution of international humanitarianism and human rights politics during the long nineteenth century. Rather than cast "human rights" as a straightforwardly progressive, countervailing pressure on the practices of imperialism, however, and rather than focus simply on the statesmen and liberal intellectuals who animate most studies of this kind, the dissertation draws on the personal and organizational papers of a wide variety of reformers in order to reveal the contentious origins of pressure groups dedicated to relieving distant suffering. Abolitionists and their descendants, missionaries, émigré nationalists, African American journalists, and Jewish communal leaders all vied to define the boundaries of intervention, the nature