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Great Documents of the World provides
an unusual perspective on the struggle for religious, social,
and political freedom. It ranges through history and traces
those documents which have served as milestones in the development
of the human spirit and which have shaped or left their
mark on our own thinking. A unique design concept brings
together reproductions of the original documents, whenever
available, with transcriptions of the text. Each document
is placed in its historical context and interpreted by Professor
Heer, a distinguished and internationally known scholar.
Our own century has seen two world wars,
the brutalities of the Third Reich, the purges of the Stalinist
era, and the bloody wars in Southeast Asia. And yet people
the world over are still struggling to come to grips with
the issue of human rights.
The high ideals for individual freedom and
responsibility, respect for the human being in the face
of oppression, injustice, racism, and dictatorship of any
kind are not the exclusive property of any one group of
people, of any one period of civilization, or of any one
religious, philosophic, or political system. The documents
represented in this book, therefore, range widely -- from
the Code of Hammurabi of ancient Babylonia to the Code
Napoleon of 19th-century France, from Plato's Republic
of classical Athens to the Manifesto of the Communist Party
of 1848, from the Magna Carta in 1215 to the Constitution
of the United States in 1787, from Luther's Ninety-five
Theses to John XXIII's Pacem in Terris.
Friedrich Heer is professor at the University
of Vienna and is the author of, among other books, Challenge
of Youth, The World of Charlemagne, The Fires
of Faith, and The Medieval World: Europe Eleven Hundred
to Thirteen Fifty.
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