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HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Words of Ages - Witnessing U.S. History Through Literature: From Thomas Paine and Washington Irving to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Words of Ages culls the experience of American history from the nation’s greatest writers, providing primary source accounts of critical moments in history. In this framework, personal viewpoints, accompanied by contextual information, provide a fuller understanding of historic events and provoke thoughtful analysis beyond the facts. Below is the full list of units.

UNIT 1: A “NEW WORLD,” A NEW NATION

THEME I: EXPLORERS AND THEME 2: VOICES OF A THEME 3: THE SEARCH FOR A EARLY SETTLERS REVOLUTION NATIONAL IDENTITY

John Smith Jonathan Edwards Philip Freneau The General History of Virginia, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry “On the Emigration to America New England, and the Summer God” and Peopling the Western Isles Country” Benjamin Franklin Robert Beverley “The Way to Wealth” John Jay The History and Present State of “Federalist No. 2” Virginia John Woolman “Considerations on Keeping Olaudah Equiano William Bradford Negroes” The Interesting Narrative of the Life Of Plymouth Plantation of Olaudah Equiano James Fenimore Cooper John Winthrop The Last of the Mohicans: A Meriwether Lewis & William Clark “A Model of Christian Charity” Narrative of 1757 The History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Anne Bradstreet Thomas Paine “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Common Sense Washington Irving Anne Bradstreet...” A Tour on the Prairies Thomas Jefferson Nathaniel Hawthorne Declaration of Independence Tecumseh “The Minister’s Black Veil” “Tecumseh’s Plea to the Choctaws John Adams & Abigail Adams and the Chickasaws” Personal Letters John Dos Passos The Shackles of Power: Three Jeffersonian Decades UNIT 2: NATIONALISM AND SECTIONALISM

THEME 1: A CONFIDENT THEME 2: SLAVERY AND THE THEME 3: CIVIL WAR AND NATION ABOLITION MOVEMENT RECONSTRUCTION

Ralph Waldo Emerson Frederick Douglass Herman Melville “The Young American” Narrative of the Life of Frederick “The Portent” Douglass Henry David Thoreau Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage: An “Resistance to Civil Government” Harriet Jacobs Episode of the American Civil War Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Margaret Fuller Louisa May Alcott Woman in the Nineteenth Harriet Beecher Stowe “Hospital Sketches” Century Uncle Tom’s Cabin John Esten Cooke Walt Whitman George Fitzhugh Mohun “Great Are the Myths” Sociology for the South Walt Whitman John L. O’Sullivan Angelina Grimke Weld “O Captain! My Captain!” “Annexation” “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South” Booker T. Washington Juan Nepomuceno Seguin “Up from Slavery” Personal Memoirs John Greenleaf Whittier W.E.B. DuBois “The Hunters of Men” The Souls of Black Folk

UNIT 3: INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA

THEME 1: THE CLOSING OF THE THEME 2: ARTISTS RENDER THEME 3: SOCIAL CRITICS AND FRONTIER INDUSTRIALIZATION AND REFORMERS URBANIZATION Willa Cather Francis E.Watkins Harper O Pioneers! Bret Harte “We Are All Bound Up Together” “What the Engines Said” Bret Harte Elizabeth Cady Stanton Eighty Years and More: “Chiquita” Rebecca Harding Davis Reminiscences 1815-1897 “Life in the Iron Mills” Nat Love Mary Wilkins Freeman The Life and Adventures of Nat Edith Wharton “A Church Mouse” Love, Better Known in the Cattle The Age of Innocence Country as Deadwood Dick Samuel L. Clemens Hart Crane Huckleberry Finn A Mexican Folk Ballad “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge” “Kansas I” Lincoln Steffens Abraham Cahan The Shame of the Cities Hamlin Garland Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto “The Passing of the Buffalo” Upton Sinclair The Jungle Carl Sandburg Black Elk “Chicago” Black Elk Speaks UNIT 4: DEMOCRACY AND ADVERSITY

THEME 1: THE JAZZ AGE THEME 2: GREAT DEPRESSION THEME 3: WORLD WAR II AND THE NEW DEAl E. Scott Fitzgerald E.B. White The Great Gatsby John Dos Passos “Freedom” The Big Money Dorothy Parker Leon Uris “Song of Perfect Propriety” Clifford Odets Battle Cry Waiting for Lefty Upton Sinclair Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston The Flivver King Meridel LeSueur & James D. Houston “Women on the Breadlines” Farewell to Manzanar Toni Morrison Jazz John Steinbeck Countee Cullen The Grapes of Wrath “Apostrophe to the Land” Langston Hughes “The Weary Blues” Ralph Ellison Martha Gellhorn “Colonial Park” The Face of War Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God Genevieve Taggard Elie Wiesel “Proud Day” Night

John Hersey Hiroshima

UNIT 5: THE CHALLENGES OF POWER

THEME 1: PROSPERITY AND THEME 2: RIGHTS AND THEME 3: THE VIETNAM YEARS ANXIETY REVOLUTIONS David Halberstam Annie Dillard Martin Luther King Jr. one very hot day An American Childhood “Letter from Birmingham Jail” Tim O’Brien Sloan Wilson Malcolm X Going after Cacciato The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit “Message to the Grass Roots” Denise Levertov Jack Kerouac Judy Brady “Life at War” On the Road “Why I Want a Wife” Philip Roth Anne Moody Sandra Cisneros American Pastoral Coming of Age in Mississippi The House on Mango Street Robert Olen Butler Arthur Miller Mary Crow Dog “Letters from My Father” The Crucible Lakota Woman

Tom Wolfe Bob Dylan The Right Stuff “Blowin’ in the Wind”

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