Sources for Cultures of the West, Volume 2 Since 1350

Designed to accompany Cultures of the West: Volume 1: To 1750, Fourth Edition (2023) and Cultures of the West: Volume 2: Since 1350, Fourth Edition (2023) by Clifford R. Backman, the fourth editions of Sources for Cultures of the West, Volume 1: To 1750 and Sources for Cultures of the West, Volume 2: Since 1350 feature approximately six written sources per chapter that highlight key themes in the study of Western civilization. Each of the 200 sources is accompanied by a headnote and study questions. Each volume begins with a special unit, "How to Read a Primary Source," that provides students with important advice on how to work with textual documents in studying the past. The fourth edition includes fifteen new sources.

Clifford R. Backman has been a member of the History Department at Boston University since 1989. In addition to the two-semester Western Civilization course, he teaches several courses on medieval Europe, the Mediterranean, the Crusades, piracy, and the history of sexual morality. He also teaches in the university's Core Curriculum, a four semester sequence in the humanities and the social sciences.

* = New to this Edition

How to Read a Primary Source

Chapter 12 Renaissances and Reformations
12.1 Francesco Petrarca, "Letter to Posterity"
12.2 From Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (Mad Orlando), 1516
12.3 Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, ca. 1517
12.4 Erasmus, "Letter to a Friend," "Julius Excluded from Heaven," and Introduction to the Gospels, first published 1522
12.5 Martin Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian, Dedicatory Letter to Pope Leo X, 1520
12.6 Martin Luther, "Preface to the New Testament," first published 1522
12.7 Francesco Guicciardini, Florence under Lorenzo de' Medici
12.8 Benvenuto Cellini, My Life, 1558-1563
12.9 Vasari, Lives of Artists, first published in 1550, revised and added to until 1568
* 12.10 Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography, 1558-1563

Chapter 13 Worlds Old and New
13.1 Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account, written 1542; published 1552
13.2 Nicolaus Copernicus, Dedication of The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies to Pope Paul III, 1543
13.3 Galileo Galilei, Letter to Don Benedetto Castelli, December 21, 1613
13.4 John Donne, Sermon, December 12, 1626; "To His Mistress Going to Bed," 1633
13.5 René Descartes, A Discourse on Method, 1637
13.6 The Jesuit Relations, French North America, 1649
13.7 Thomas Hobbes, "On Natural Law," Leviathan, 1651

Chapter 14 The War of All against All
14.1 John Foxe, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Trial of Anne Askew
14.2 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, "The Court of Suleiman the Magnificent," 1581
14.3 From Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris, ca. 1593
14.4 Johannes Junius, Letter to His Daughter and Trial Transcript, 1628

Chapter 15 From Westphalia to Paris: Regimes Old and New
15.1 Anne of France, Lessons for My Daughter, 1560-1600
15.2 Molière, The Misanthrope, first performed 1666
15.3 Cardinal Richelieu, "The Role of the King," Political Testament, ca. 1638, first published 1688
15.4 Jean Domat, Civil Laws According to the Natural Order, 1697
15.5 François Fénelon, The Adventures of Telemachus, 1699
* 15.6 Daniel Defoe/Captain Charles Johnson, "The Life of Anne Bonny," 1724
* 15.7 The Absolutist Regimes

Chapter 16 The Enlightened
16.1 John Locke, "Of Tyranny," Two Treatises of Government, 1689
16.2 Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, 1722
16.3A Rousseau, "A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," 1755
16.3B Voltaire, Letter to Rousseau on the Latter's "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," 1755
16.4 Cesare Beccaria, "On Torture," Of Crimes and Punishments, 1764
16.5 Adam Smith, "Of the Principle of the Commercial or Mercantile System," The Wealth of Nations, 1776
* 16.6 Germaine de Staël, Memoirs

Chapter 17 The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire
17.1 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
* 17.2 Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, 1791
17.3 Maximilien Robespierre, Report of the Principles of Public Morality, 1794
17.4 Napoleon, Letters to His Brother Jérôme, 1801-1812
17.5 Jakob Walter, Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier, written 1856, first published 1932

Chapter 18 Industrialization and Its Discontents
18.1 William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," 1798; "The World Is Too Much with Us," 1806
18.2 Letter of Bettina von Arnim to Johann Goethe, 1810
18.3 Thomas Carlyle, "Signs of the Times," 1829
18.4 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1851

Chapter 19 The Birth of Modern Politics
19.1 Lajos Kossuth, Speech of the 11th July, 1848
19.2 Karl Marx, "First Premises of the Materialist Method," The German Ideology, 1846, first published 1932
19.3 Johann Georg Eccarius, from "The Friend of the People," No. 4, January 4, 1851
19.4 Caroline Norton, "On the Infant Custody Bill," 1839; "On Divorce," 1855
19.5 Isabella Beeton, From Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1861

Chapter 20 Nationalism and Identity
20.1 Charles Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis, 1848
20.2 Matthew Arnold, Preamble; "On a Definition of Culture," Culture and Anarchy, 1867
20.3 Edward Augustus Freeman, Race and Language, 1879
20.4 Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 1888
20.5 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, 1895

Chapter 21 The Modern Woman
21.1 Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792
21.2 Caroline Norton, English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century, 1854
21.3 Winnifred Cooley, "The Bachelor Maiden," The New Womanhood, 1904
21.4 Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education, 1912
21.5 Emmeline Pankhurst, "Freedom or Death," 1913
21.6 Rebecca West, "The Sterner Sex" 1913

Chapter 22 The Challenge of Secularism
22.1 Charles Lyell, from "On Extinct Quadrupeds," Principles of Geology, 1830-1833
22.2 Abraham Geiger, "Moral and Legal Rules," Judaism and Islam, 1833
22.3 Ernest Renan, "Miracles," 1863
22.4 Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," 1863
22.5 Charles Darwin, "On Sociability," The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871
22.6 Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain (À Rebours), 1884
22.7 Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man under Socialism," 1891
22.8 Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual Element in Art, 1912
22.9 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1929
* 22.10 Pope Pius IX, The Syllabus of Errors, 1864

Chapter 23 The Great Land Grab
23.1 Winston Churchill, "The Battle of Omdurman," The River War, 1899
23.2 John A. Hobson, "Criticism of Imperialism," Imperialism, 1902
23.3 Mark Twain, King Leopold's Soliloquy, 1905
23.4 Mohandas Gandhi, Indian Home Rule, 1910
23.5 Frederick Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911
23.6 Presidential Address of Chitta Ranjan Das, Indian National Congress at Gaya, December 1922
* 23.7 Francis Galton, "Africa for the Chinese," 1873

Chapter 24 The World at War (Part I)
24.1 Rudyard Kipling, France at War, 1915
24.2 Extracts from the Treaty of Versailles, 1919
24.3 Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, 1920
24.4 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929
24.5 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion, 1933

Chapter 25 Radical Realignments
25.1 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919
25.2 Paul Valéry, A Crisis of the Mind, 1919
25.3 Henry Ford, The International Jew, 1920
25.4 Adolf Hitler, Excerpts from a Speech Delivered to Open the Congress of the National Socialist Party, 1933
25.5 Benito Mussolini, "Force and Consent," 1923
25.6 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918
25.7 Friedrich Hayek, "Economic Control and Totalitarianism," 1944

Chapter 26 The World at War (Part II)
26.1 Aldous Huxley, An Encyclopaedia of Pacifism, 1937
26.2 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938
26.3 Adolf Hitler, Speech from September 19, 1939
26.4 Gustave Gilbert, Nuremburg Diary, 1947
26.5 Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed, 1949
* 26.6 Victims of the Shoah

Chapter 27 Theater of the Absurd: The Postwar World
* 27.1 Simone Weil, "The Love of Religious Practices," 1950
27.2 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942
27.3 Nikolai Novikov, On Postwar American Policy, 1946
27.4 Winston Churchill, "Iron Curtain" Speech, March 5, 1947
27.5 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
27.6 Simone de Beauvoir, Introduction to The Second Sex, 1949
27.7 Abba Eban, "The Arab Refugee Problem," 1958
* 27.8 Decolonization around the World

Chapter 28 Something to Believe In
28.1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sermon of January 21, 1934
28.2 Paul Tillich, Collective Guilt, 1943
28.3 Reinhold Niebuhr, Sermon on Humor and Faith, 1946
28.4 Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Humanism of Existentialism," 1947
28.5 Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, 1963
28.6 NSC (National Security Council) Memorandum 68: April 14, 1950
28.7 Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 1968
28.8 Gamal Abdel Nasser, Resignation Speech, 1967
28.9 Enoch Powell, "Rivers of Blood" Speech, 1968
28.10 Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," 1978
28.11 Ayatollah Khomeini, Message, 1980
28.12 Founding Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), 1987
* 28.13 Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," 1975
28.14 Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, "How I Came to Dissent," 1974
28.15 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, On Nuclear Defense, 1985-1987

Chapter 29 Global Warmings
29.1 Halidé Edib Adivar, Memoirs, 1926 and 1928
29.2 Fatima Mernissi, "The Story of a Female Psychic," 1989
29.3 Francis Fukuyama, "Our Pessimism," 1992
29.4 Luce Irigaray, from An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1993
29.5 Martha Nussbaum, "The Idea of World Citizenship," from Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, 1998
29.6 Richard Rorty, "Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes," 1998
29.7 George W. Bush, Speech to Congress, September 20, 2001
29.8 European Council on Fatwa and Research, Decrees Regarding Muslim Women in Europe, 2001
29.9 Mohammed Arkoun, "In Praise of Subversive Reason: Beyond Dialogue and the Quest for Identity," 2005
29.10 World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report, 2010
* 29.11 Vladimir Putin, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," 2021