75 Thematic Readings

1. Language and Communication

Richard Rodriguez, “Aria”

Maxine Hong Kingston, “Silence”

Gloria Anzaldua, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”

Gloria Naylor, “The Meanings of a Word”

Leslie Marmon Silko, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”

Deborah Tannen, “I’m Sorry, I Won’t Apologize”

Susan Brownmiller, “Let’s Put Pornography Back in the Closet”

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

2. Education and Learning

Frederick Douglass, “Learning to Read and Write”

Maya Angelou, “Graduation”

Mike Rose, “I Just Wanna Be Average”

bell hooks, “Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education”

Adrienne Rich, “Claiming an Education”

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Whose Canon Is It, Anyway?”

Shelby Steele, “The Recoloring of Campus Life”

Neil Postman, “Virtual Students, Digital Classrooms”

3. Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

Ronald Takaki, “The Harmful Myth of Asian Superiority”

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”

Brent Staples, “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space”

Noel Ignatiev, “How the Irish Became White”

Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Casa, A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood”

Langston Hughes, “Salvation”

N. Scott Momaday, “The Way to Rainy Mountain”

4. Relationships and Sexual Politics

Alice Walker, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self”

Margaret Atwood, “The Female Body”

Ellen Goodman, “A Reasonable Woman Standard”

Camille Paglia, “Rape and Modern Sex War”

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “The Making of a Divorce Culture”

Judy Brady, “Why I [Still] Want a Wife”

Scott Russell Sanders, “The Men We Carry In Our Minds”

Cornel West, “On Black Fathering”

Anna Quindlen, “Evan’s Two Moms”

Bruno Bettleheim, “Cinderella”

Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”

5. Government, Power, and Justice

Machiavelli, “The Qualities of a Prince”

Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Sentiments”

Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman”

Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream”

Hannah Arendt, “Deportations from Western Europe”

Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”

George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”

E.B. White, “The Meaning of Democracy”

6. Economics, Work, and Consumer Culture

Adam Smith, “Principle of the Commercial System”

Benjamin Franklin, “The Way to Wealth”

Patricia J. Williams, “Gilded Lilies and Liberal Guilt”

Jesse Jackson, “Who Makes the Clothes We Wear”

Studs Terkel, “Mike Lefevre, Steelworker”

Barbara Ehrenreich, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”

Russell Baker, “Work in Corporate America”

James Q. Wilson, “Cars and Their Enemies”

Gloria Steinem, “Sex, Lies and Advertising”

James Twitchell, “But First, A Word from Our Sponsor”

Dave Barry, “Red, White and Beer”

7. Philosophy, Ethics, and the Value of Life

Plato, “Allegory of the Cave”

William Bennett, “America at Risk: Can We Survive Without Moral Values”

Edward Koch, “Death and Justice”

James Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia”

Sallie Tisdale, “We Do Abortions Here”

Lars Eighner, “On Dumpster Diving”

Nancy Mairs, “On Being a Cripple”

Virginia Woolf, “Death of a Moth”

8. Nature, Science, and Technology

Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin’s Middle Road”

Lewis Thomas, “Lives of a Cell”

Edward O. Wilson, “Is Humanity Suicidal?”

Chief Seattle, “Letter to President Pierce”

Terry Tempest Williams, “The Clan of One-Breasted Women”

Ursula LeGuin, “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas”

Jeremy Rifkin, “The Ultimate Theraphy: Commercial Eugenics on the Eve of the Biotech Century”

Charles Krauthammer, “Of Headless Mice and Men”

Howard Rheingold, “The Virtual Community”

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