Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
—Richard Steele, The Tatler
SUBJECT: History and reading
TIME REQUIRED: 10 hours per week
If grammar-stage learning is fact-centered and logic-stage learning is skill-centered, then rhetoric-stage learning is idea-centered. During the rhetoric stage, the student actively engages with the ideas of the past and present—not just reading about them, but evaluating them, tracing their development, and comparing them to other philosophies and opinions.
This sounds abstract, but fortunately there’s a very practical way to engage in this conversation of ideas: read, talk about, and write about the great books of the world.
To some extent, the division between history and literature has always been artificial; we know about history from archaeology and anthropology, but our primary source of historical knowledge is the testimony of those who lived in the past. Without the books written by Aristotle, Homer, Plato, Virgil, and Caesar, we would know very little about the politics, religion, culture, and ideals of Greece and Rome.
By ninth grade, the student has already traveled twice through the story of mankind; she’s already been exposed to the major writers and thinkers of each historical period. Although the student will record dates and read summaries of historical events, the focus of rhetoric-stage history is on ideas rather than on facts. The study of great books allows the past to speak for itself, combining history, creative writing, philosophy, politics, and ethics into a seamless whole.
The goal of the rhetoric stage is a greater understanding of our own civilization, country, and place in time, stemming from an understanding of what has come before us. “The old books,” writes classical schoolmaster David Hicks, “lay a foundation for all later learning and life.”1 The student who has read Aristotle and Plato on human freedom, Thomas Jefferson on liberty, Frederick Douglass on slavery, and Martin Luther King, Jr., on civil rights will read Toni Morrison’s Beloved with an understanding denied to the student who comes to the book without any knowledge of its roots.
Remember, again, that the goal of classical education is not an exhaustive exploration of great literature. The student with a well-trained mind continues to read, think, and analyze long after classes have ended.
We have supplied lists of great books for each year of study, the ninth-grade list being the shortest, the twelfth-grade list the longest and most complex. A few words about list making:
HOW TO DO IT
Once again, you’ll be dividing your study into four years: Ancients (5000 B.C.–A.D. 400) in ninth grade; medieval–early Renaissance (400–1600) in tenth grade; late Renaissance–early modern (1600–1850) in eleventh grade; modern (1850–present) in twelfth grade.
For each year of study, the student should keep a large three-ringed binder, labeled “History and the Great Books.” Each binder should be divided into four sections: The History Foundation, Book Contexts, Book Notes, and Compositions.
Half of each week’s study time will be devoted to laying a foundation of historical knowledge; the second half, to the study of the Great Books.
The History Foundation
Half of each week’s study time will be devoted to laying the history foundation. The student begins by once again progressing through the story of history, as he did in the grammar stage and logic stages of learning. In this third journey through time, his reading sets the stage for his encounter with the Great Books.
We suggest the following texts:
The student’s task, over the course of each year, is simply to read each one of these books in the order listed above.
Your lesson planning is straightforward: count the total number of chapters assigned for the year and divide by the number of weeks you intend to do school—36 weeks is a useful benchmark. Fast readers should have no difficulty completing the work. For slower readers, you may choose to eliminate some of the chapters.
At the end of each chapter, the student should stop and record the following on a sheet of notebook paper:
Note: George Tindall’s America: A Narrative History has “thought questions” at the end of each chapter; answering these briefly in writing can replace the assignment above.
Study of the Great Books
The second half of each week’s study will be devoted to reading, thinking about, and writing about the Great Books. You’ll want to keep two additional reference books on hand: The Timetables of History, a big paperback reference book listing historical events, birth and death dates of important people, books, painting, inventions, and other facts from 4500 B.C. until the end of the twentieth century; and the Dorling Kindersley History of the World, a simple but highly visual survey of world history that covers people and events and all continents.
Try to make a realistic assessment of how many books the student will be able to cover in the course of a year. Eight books is a minimum; twelve is better; eighteen is stellar. Choose eight (or twelve, or eighteen) titles from the lists that follow, and read them in chronological order over the course of the year.
As he reads each book, the student will add a page to each of the remaining three sections of the notebook.
Book Contexts
For each book on this personalized list, the student should follow this pattern:
Book Notes
Now the student should prepare to read the first Great Book on the list.
Compositions
We offer the following lists of great books as general guides for the high-school student. Although she isn’t obliged to read everything on this list, what she does read should be read in chronological order, as has been organized here.
Ninth Grade
Bible: Genesis—Book of Job
Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2500 B.C.)
Homer, Iliad and Odyssey (c. 850 B.C.)
Sophocles, Oedipus the King (490 B.C.)
Aeschylus, Agamemnon (c. 458 B.C.)
Herodotus, The Histories (c. 441 B.C.)
Euripides, Medea (c. 431 B.C.)
Aristophanes, The Birds (c. 400 B.C.)
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (c. 400 B.C.)
Plato, The Republic (c. 375 B.C.)
Aristotle, On Poetics (350 B.C.)
Aristotle, Rhetoric (c. 350 B.C.)
Bible: Book of Daniel (c. 165 B.C.)
Horace, Odes (c. 65 B.C.)
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (c. 60 B.C.)
Cicero, De republica (54 B.C.)
Virgil, Aeneid (c. 30 B.C.)
Ovid, Metamorphoses (c. A.D.5)
Bible: Corinthians 1 and 2 (c. A.D. 58)
Josephus, Wars of the Jews (c. A.D. 68)
Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (c. A.D. 100)
Tacitus, Annals (c. A.D. 117)
Athanasius, On the Incarnation (c. A.D. 300)
Tenth Grade
Augustine, Confessions (c. 411)
Augustine, City of God, Book 8 (c. 426)
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (524)
Koran (selections) (c. 650)
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731)
Beowulf (c. 1000)
Mabinogion (c. 1050)
Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (c. 1090)
Robert Goodwin, ed., Aquinas: Selected Writings (c. 1273)
Dante, The Inferno (1320)
Everyman (14th century)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400)
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (selections) (c. 1400)
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430)
Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (selections) (c. 1470)
Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince (selections) (1510)
Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)
Thomas More, Utopia (1516)
Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (c. 1520)
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (selections) (1536)
Christopher Marlowe, Faustus (1588)
Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself (1588)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590)
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (1599)
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600)
William Shakespeare, any other plays (c. 1592–1611)
Eleventh Grade
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (abridged) (1605)
King James Bible, Psalms (1611)
John Donne, Divine Meditations (c. 1635)
Rene Descartes, Meditations (1641)
John Milton, Paradise Lost (selections) (1644)
Moliere, Tartuffe (1669)
Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1670)
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1679)
John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” or “On the True End of Civil Government” (1690)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract” (1762)
Edmund Burke, “On American Taxation” (1774)
The Declaration of Independence (1776)
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781)
Alexander Hamilton et al., The Federalist (1787–1788)
Constitution of the United States (ratified 1788)
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789)
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (1791)
Thomas Paine, “The Rights of Man” (1792)
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1815)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” and other poems (1820s)
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” and other poems (1832)
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other stories (1839)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1844)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Twelfth Grade
Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest (1830–1886)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1856)
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species (1859)
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1861)
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863)
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878)
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879)
Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883)
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884)
W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems (1895)
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1899)
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
G. K. Chesterton, “The Innocence of Father Brown” (1911)
Wilfrid Owen, Selected Poems (1918)
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (1921)
Robert Frost, “A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes” (Pulitzer, 1924)
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (c. 1937)
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
Thornton Wilder, Our Town (1938)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1939)
George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952)
Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (1962)
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Why We Can’t Wait” (1964)
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1974)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1988)
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (1991)
Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (1995)
The ninth grader, for example, would prepare to read Aristophanes’ The Birds by first identifying the historical period under study: 450 B.C.–387 B.C., the lifespan of Aristophanes. She’ll then look up 450–387 B.C. in the Timetables of History. The Timetables reveal that during this period, several important law systems (the Torah and the Twelve Tables of the Roman law) were codified; Greek architecture flourished (the Acropolis was rebuilt along with several other important Greek buildings); the plague swept through Athens; Greece fought its way through a series of important battles, including the Peloponnesian War; and Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem. According to the Dorling Kindersley History of the World, Darius of Persia rose to power as well; the Paracus culture flourished in Peru; and in Ohio, the Adena people reached the peak of their civilization.
Using this information plus knowledge gathered from her history reading, the student would go on to create a Context page—one or two pages summarizing the most significant historical events between 450 and 387 B.C. Since The Birds is a Greek work, the summary should begin by focusing on events in Greece—the Peloponnesian War, the renaissance in architecture, Greece’s form of government—and should then go on to explain events in other countries. (Don’t worry about having a “topic sentence” in this composition, or about putting it into essay format; although it should be grammatically correct and spelled properly, these Context pages are likely to sound list-like. “Meanwhile, over in Asia…”)
This summary page is not meant to be an exhaustive study of ancient history between 450 and 387 B.C. Rather, the student should choose to focus on one series of events during this time. She’ll write more than one summary about this period, after all; as she reads Herodotus or Sophocles or Plato, she’ll come back to these years again and write yet another Context page, focusing on a different series of events. But even if she doesn’t return to this period of history, don’t worry. As in every part of the classical education, you’re not aiming for a total mastery of history. You’re teaching methods of learning—in this case, how to read historical documents and put them into context. The student who masters this process will go on “doing history” for the rest of her life. When this summary page is done, the student should file it in the Book Contexts section of the notebook.
The Birds is a play, so the student will now read the brief history of drama and the tips on how to read drama from The Well-Educated Mind (Chapter 8, “The World Stage: Reading through History with Drama”). She’ll take notes, paying special attention to the development of Greek drama. She’ll then read the annotation for The Birds, which outlines the basic plot. Finally, she’ll crack open her volume of Aristophanes and read The Birds for herself, taking notes as The Well-Educated Mind directs. When she’s finished, she’ll head these notes “The Birds by Aristophanes” and put them in the Book Notes section of the great-books notebook.
Once this is done, she’ll sit down with you (or a tutor; see Chapter 43) and talk about the play. Why was it written? What’s Aristophanes’ main point? Does it succeed as a drama? Which parts were interesting? Which were boring? Why? What is the play’s structure? How might it be staged? The Well-Educated Mind provides discussion questions for each kind of literature in the “Third Level of Inquiry: Rhetoric-Stage Reading” section of each chapter; Reading Strands, published by the National Writing Institute, will also give you a pattern for this kind of Socratic dialogue.
When the conversation is over, the student is ready to write. She can do a standard “book report,” summarizing the plot of The Birds and giving a brief evaluation of the play. She can answer one of the discussion questions in The Well-Educated Mind. She can explain what Aristophanes is saying about the nature of man and either agree or disagree. She can write about some technical aspect of Greek drama and how it applies to a scene in the play (this might require some additional research about the staging of Greek drama). This finished composition—which will give her a chance to exercise some of the skills taught in the writing and rhetoric programs recommended in Chapters 17, 24, and 25—should be filed in the Compositions section of the notebook.
How much should you do?
Rather than holding rigidly to a schedule of how much to complete per week, you should instead devote two hours per day to reading and taking notes on history, and to reading, talking about, and writing about the Great Books. You can choose to spend the first hour of each day on history, the second on Great Books; or the first five hours of each week on history, the second five on Great Books; or one week on history, one on Great Books; or the first semester of each year on history, the second on Great Books. Don’t worry about keeping history reading and Great Books reading somehow parallel; the two areas of study will fall within the same historical period, but the student will progress through them at different rates. And the time spent on any particular Great Book can vary widely. If the ninth grader isn’t stirred by Greek drama, she’ll probably finish the Aristophanes assignment in a week. If she decides to write about a technical aspect of staging Greek drama, though, she’ll need to do extra reading and research, and the Birds assignment could easily cover two or three weeks.
As a parent, it’s your responsibility to make sure that those two hours are actually spent in reading and writing, rather than in daydreaming or creating doodles on notebook paper. Especially in the early years of high school, you should supervise this process, rather than allowing the student to disappear into the family room alone with her books. Great Books study in particular is demanding. It requires the student to work hard, to abandon simple question-and-answer learning in favor of a struggle with ideas. Often, the material isn’t immediately appealing. The philosophies may be unfamiliar; the opinions are complex; the vocabulary is challenging. Put the student at the kitchen table (or wherever you’re planning to be) so that you can encourage her to keep working.
Where do you get the books?
Classical education, as Douglas Wilson notes, isn’t a package deal: “No one supplier or textbook publisher will provide you with everything you need in a fifty-pound box delivered by UPS.”4 High-school students will need to do some bookstore hunting and library scouring to find these texts (think of this as a class in advanced reference skills). However, the resurgence of interest in great-books curricula has produced affordable reprints of most of these books. Where we know of a particularly good edition, we’ve listed it, along with ordering information, at the end of this chapter. But finding the books is part of the process of education.
The sets of Norton anthologies described in Resources at the end of the chapter are wonderful reference works. These contain many difficult-to-find texts (such as the Epic of Gilgamesh) and a nice sampling of poetry. We suggest that you find “real books” (stand-alone texts) when possible because anthologies are awkward to handle and the print is very small. Also, they’re hard to read in bed and impossible to handle in the bathtub.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE GREAT BOOKS
Talking is a necessary part of learning; a student can’t write well about the great books until she’s had an opportunity to converse about them. But many parents feel intimidated by the thought of carrying on a conversation about Aristophanes or Moby-Dick.
If you can read some of these great books along with your student, the discussion questions in The Well-Educated Mind will give you plenty of material for conversation. (Remember, there aren’t necessarily “right” answers to most of these questions; what’s more important is the process of talking the ideas through.) If you can’t read the books, don’t hesitate to make use of Cliffs Notes, which supply not only plot summaries, but also biographical notes, cultural background, discussion questions, and bibliographies for further reading. Pink Monkey Notes, which can be read online at www.pinkmonkey.com, are comparable in quality.
However, you don’t have to shoulder the responsibility of this study alone. When you home-educate a high-school student, you organize her curriculum—but you can always outsource teaching responsibilities for those subjects for which you feel unprepared. The student still benefits from the personalized programs and individual attention that are so characteristic of home schooling when you use a tutor.
What options do you have for great-books study? First, ask around your community: colleagues, home-schooling friends, religious community. You might find an ex-English major who wrote a thesis on Pride and Prejudice, or an ex-classics major who studied Plato at Harvard twenty-five years ago and would be delighted to discuss the Republic with your high school student. Asking a friend to tutor your student for a year would be an imposition. Asking a friend to have a two-hour conversation about one book isn’t. Remember: your student is working on a very basic level during this first introduction to the classics. She doesn’t necessarily need a Ph.D. candidate to discuss the book with her.
If you live near a university or community college, call the secretary of the appropriate department (English for British or American literature, classics for Greek or Latin, comparative literature for modern works in translation, drama or theater for all plays) and ask whether any member of the faculty is interested in meeting with your student. You can also use graduate students and responsible seniors for this sort of tutoring; a good prep school might also supply you with a tutor.
At the end of this chapter, we have provided a list of universities that offer varying types of great-books curricula. These will prove especially valuable to those who live nearby. Most of the universities will also supply you with copies of their great-books reading lists and curricula on request; some may even allow you to join in online discussion groups or e-mail lists.
Online tutorials and discussion groups not connected to universities may also help your high-school student begin her study of great books. Paid great-books tutorials for high-school students are offered by Escondido Tutorial Services (www.gbt.org), a classical tutoring service with a Reformed Protestant emphasis, and several other online tutorial services; a list is provided at the end of this chapter.
The American Classical League (www.aclclassics.org) has information about Greek and Latin texts, local teachers, and more; ACL also sponsors the National Junior Classical League (www.njcl.org) for high-school students studying the classics. Western Canon Great Books University (www.westerncanon.com) provides discussion forums (moderated by volunteer tutors) and links to other forums, lists, and online lectures centered on the great books of the Western tradition. More discussion forums can be found at www.welltrainedmind.com.
WRITING PROJECTS
The student should plan on writing a research paper in the spring of the ninth-and tenth-grade years. These research papers—six to eight pages in ninth grade, seven to ten pages in tenth grade—explore a historical topic. The ninth-and tenth-grade research papers should attempt to prove a theory about some historical event or series of events, using three to eight history resources, both primary (the works of Plato) and secondary (a critic’s book about the works of Plato). These papers will put the techniques of rhetoric now being learned into use in writing and will prepare the student for the junior and senior projects described in Chapter 33.
Research-paper forms and procedures are covered in all of the grammar and composition texts we recommend. But because the very term research paper seems to terrify many parents (and students), we offer the following brief guide to preparing the first two research papers.
Preparation
Classically educated students don’t need to suffer from “paper phobia,” since the ongoing study of grammar and composition from early on and the continual writing of short papers have prepared them for the writing of longer papers. Along with mechanics, style, paragraph organization, and the development of arguments—all taught in the texts we recommend—the student must know how to outline.
In a proper outline, each subpoint supports the point that comes before:
I.
A.
1.
a.
Correct outlining is taught in the Rod & Staff grammar books. If you’re using a grammar text that doesn’t cover outlining, consider ordering Study Is Hard Work, an excellent guide to study skills written by William H. Armstrong. Chapter Six, “Putting Ideas in Order,” covers outlining skills. The entire guide is valuable, but it’s written on a senior high/early college level, and many ninth graders may find its tone (not to mention the scary title) a little daunting. For simpler outlining resources, see Chapter 17.
Inventio
Classical rhetoric divides writing into three stages: inventio, dispositio, and elocutio. Inventio, formulating an argument, involves picking the subject, deciding on a specific topic, and writing a thesis statement. Think of inventio as a three-step process.
1. Prereading. The student shouldn’t begin by trying to write a thesis statement. Nor should she start making note cards immediately. Rather, she should begin by spending three or four weeks reading about the general topic she’s decided to write on. Begin this process sometime in January. If, for example, the ninth grader decides to write about the Greek Empire after the death of Alexander the Great, she shouldn’t try to come up with an exact subject for her paper right away. If she does, she’ll more than likely end up with an unworkable subject—one that’s too broad or too vague. Instead, she should plan to skim through plenty of books, reading the sections that deal with the Greeks after Alexander. She shouldn’t make notes yet, but should put bookmarks (strips of notebook paper are fine) on any pages she finds particularly interesting or informative. As she reads, she should brainstorm, jotting down on a pad of paper thoughts that come to mind, questions that her reading brings up, and comments on what she’s finding out. These jottings don’t need to be connected in any way. The student is simply exploring all the branches of her topic.
2. Settling on an exact subject. After the student has done plenty of prereading—covering ten books or more—she should gather together all her jottings and look for a particular theme that keeps popping up. If she finds, for example, that she has continually written “The Seleucids came after Alexander in Syria. Syria was important because of the trade routes. Antiochus the Great ruled Syria. Antiochus thought he was the sun god. The Seleucids took over Israel,” this suggests that that she should narrow her topic to “The Rulers of Syria after Alexander the Great.”
This is a narrower and more manageable topic, but the student still isn’t ready to write. Now she needs to settle on a thesis statement.
3. Developing a thesis statement is tricky. Fortunately, all the curricula we recommend carefully develop this skill. As the parent/teacher, you should remember this simple definition: a thesis is a statement that requires proof. “Alexander’s successors in Syria” or “Syria under Antiochus the Great” aren’t thesis statements—they’re simply phrases; neither needs to be proved. “Alexander’s successors shared his megalomania” or “Antiochus the Great’s insanity caused him to lose control of Syria” are thesis statements. Both require the student to explain, using examples from history to support these conclusions.
Bad thesis statements tend to have two problems: either they’re not specific enough, or they’re so obvious that they don’t require support. “Antiochus the Great was a bad ruler” is a bad thesis because it isn’t specific—you could say this about any number of ancient potentates (“Nero was a bad ruler,” “Akhenaton was a bad ruler”). “Alexander’s empire was divided among his generals” doesn’t work either. This is perfectly obvious. What’s left to say?
“Antiochus’s religious obsessions ruined his hold on his empire” is a good thesis statement because it leaves the student something to prove. She’s suggesting a specific cause for the decline of the Seleucid Empire. Now she has to defend this conclusion, using historical evidence.
Dispositio
Once the student settles on a topic, she has to arrange supporting information in proper order for a persuasive argument—dispositio.
The student should begin by glancing back over the notes she’s taken on her reading. From this information, she should make an outline covering the main points of her argument. These are the facts her reader will have to believe in order to be convinced. The outline should be very basic, only three or four points long, each point assigned a Roman numeral. The ninth grader’s outline might look like this:
The student should then write each major point at the top of a separate sheet of paper.
Now she’s ready to start making note cards. The classic way of collecting information for a research paper is to write down quotes and general information on 3 × 5 cards, each card marked with the title of the book used and the author’s last name. The student should go back through the books she used for prereading. In each place where she put a marker, she should evaluate whether or not the information supports one of her main points. If so, she should jot down on the note card either a paraphrase of the idea in the book or an exact quote. And she should indicate on each card where the information belongs by marking it with a Roman numeral that corresponds to a numeral on the outline.
There’s no reason why the student shouldn’t do this on a computer. Note cards have traditionally been used because the student can shuffle them around as she works on the flow of her argument. But since the cut-and-paste function on a word processor has the same effect, she can input her quotes and paraphrases instead.
Once the student has collected information (four to six sources for a ninth-grade paper, six to ten for a tenth-grade paper), she should put the cards for each Roman numeral into a pile and use this information to develop a more detailed outline:
Each of these points is based on a fact discovered while reading and jotted onto a card.
Elocutio
When the outline is complete, the student is ready to write. Elocutio, the final stage of written rhetoric, involves the words, phrases, figures of speech, and writing techniques used in persuasive writing. The student should sit down with the outline and note cards, and write one well-structured paragraph about each point in the outline. The paper should always conclude with a summary paragraph, restating the student’s thesis and main supporting points. Each book consulted must be placed on a bibliography page, arranged alphabetically by author. We highly recommend keeping a standard research-paper guide on hand throughout this process. Schaum’s Quick Guide to Writing Great Research Papers, by Laurie Rozakis, is an excellent and straightforward manual covering all of the above steps, and it offers guidance on how to properly document all research.
WHAT ABOUT AMERICAN GOVERNMENT?
A course in American government is a requirement for high-school graduation in most states. Traditionally, American government is offered as a separate one-credit course. However, there’s no reason to artificially separate the study of America’s present government from its historical development.
As you study through the final two years of history, you’ll cover American history from its foundation to the present. The great-books list includes the foundational texts of America’s government: The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and the Constitution of the United States (check to see that your copy includes the Bill of Rights and amendments). Make sure that these classics, along with Burke’s “On American Taxation,” Thomas Paine’s “The Rights of Man,” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, are on the student’s final reading list. The student who reads and understands these books has grasped the core principles of American civics.
However, you’ll probably want to supplement these with a guide to United States government. Although you can use a standard high-school government text (such as Holt American Government), you can also use a slightly more engaging text such as The Complete Idiot’s Guide to American Government (which covers all the government required for standard exams such as the AP or CLEP). Read the appropriate sections of the government text as part of history reading; after the student reads the Constitution, for example, she would read from the Timetables of History, and Part 1 of The Complete Idiot’s Guide (this covers the Constitutional Convention, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Amendments) or Unit 1 of Holt American Government. Read Units 7 and 8 of Holt American Government when you read The Federalist (state and local government); read Parts 2, 3, and 6 of The Complete Idiot’s Guide or Units 2, 3, and 4 of Holt when you read “On American Taxation” (this covers the branches of government); read Part 5 of The Complete Idiot’s Guide or Units 5 and 6 of Holt American Government when you read “The Rights of Man” (individual rights and the political system). These are merely suggestions, and you should feel free to divide up the student’s government reading in another way if it seems to make more sense.
If the student has time, she will also benefit from working through the Critical Thinking Press resource You Decide: Applying the Bill of Rights to Real Cases, which presents the student with clear retellings of seventy-five Supreme Court cases and invites her to judge them, using the Bill of Rights as a guide.
When the student has finished this reading, has marked essential dates in the development of the United States government on a time line, and has written about each of these foundational texts, give her a credit on her transcript for American Government (see Chapter 39 for a fuller explanation). When planning out the student’s reading list for the years that cover American history (1600–1850 and 1850–present), be sure to allow some extra time for this government study.
STARTING IN THE MIDDLE
Although this chapter describes beginning the study of the ancients in ninth grade and moving through the medieval/early Renaissance, late Renaissance/early modern, and modern lists in grades 10, 11, and 12, this pattern can be adjusted to fit your own needs. A student who has begun the chronological study of history in middle school may begin ninth grade having just finished the ancients, or ready to move into the late Renaissance/early modern years. Whenever your student reaches ninth grade, move him to whichever great-books list corresponds to the period he would naturally study next (see in Chapter 16 for more detailed directions).
If you’re just beginning this for the first time with a high-school student who only has a couple of years left, you have several choices:
UNIVERSITY SOURCES FOR GREAT-BOOKS CURRICULA
Alabama
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama: 334-844-4000 general, for great books program; www.media.cla.auburn.edu/english.
The Department of English offers “World Literature at Auburn.”
Faulkner University, Montgomery, Alabama; 800-879-9816 general; 334-386-7313 for honors college. www.faulkner.edu/o/academics/honors/gbhc/index.htm.
A Protestant school that offers great-books study through the Great Books Honors College.
California
Seaver College, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; 310-506-7654; www.seaver.pepperdine.edu/humanities/programs/greatbooks.htm.
The Great Books Colloquium is a five-course sequence offered by the Humanities/Teacher Education Division.
Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, California; 800-634-9797; www.thomasaquinas.edu.
The entire curriculum is centered on great books and Socratic teaching.
Canada
Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario; 905-688-5550; www.brocku.ca.
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario; 613-520-7400; www.carleton.ca.
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec; 514-848-2424; www.concordia.ca.
Malaspina University, Nanaimo, British Columbia; 250-753-3245; www.mala.ca (general university website).
The Malaspina website offers lists of great books, time lines, links, and more at www.malaspina.org.
Connecticut
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; 860-685-3700; www.wesleyan.edu/col.
The College of Letters is an interdisciplinary major centered on great books from ancient times to the twentieth century.
Georgia
Mercer University, Macon, Georgia; 800-MERCER-U; www.mercer.edu/gbk.
Offers a core Great Books program in the College of Liberal Arts.
Idaho
New St. Andrews College, Moscow, Idaho; 208-882-1566; www.nsa.edu.
A Reformed Protestant school where the entire curriculum is focused around the study of great books.
Illinois
Shimer College, Waukegan, Illinois; 312-235-3500; www.shimer.edu.
The college uses no textbooks—all original source readings.
The University of Chicago: William B. and Catherine V. Graham School of General Studies, Chicago, Illinois; 773-702-1722; www.grahamschool.uchicago.edu.
The Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults is a noncredit discussion program—a four-year sequence of classics.
Wilbur Wright College, Chicago, Illinois; 773-481-8014; faculty.ccc.edu/colleges/wright/greatbooks/home.htm.
Indiana
University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana; 574-631-7172; www.nd.edu/~pls.
The Program of Liberal Studies is a three-year sequence centered on great books.
Louisiana
Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Natchitoches, Louisiana; 800-838-2208 general; 318-357-6011 for the Scholars’ College; www.nsula.edu/scholars_college.
The Louisiana Scholars’ College offers a great-books program, from classics to moderns.
Maryland
St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland; 410-263-2371; www.stjohnscollege.edu.
A four-year program of reading, discussion, and writing.
Massachusetts
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts; 617-353-5404; www.bu.edu/core. The “Core Curriculum” centers on the discussion of great books and writing skills.
Minnesota
Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota; 507-786-3201; www.stolaf.edu/depts/great-conversation.
New Hampshire
Saint Anselm College, Manchester, New Hampshire; 603-641-7000; www.anselm.edu, www.dbanach.com/gbs.htm.
Offers the Liberal Studies in the Great Books program.
New Mexico
St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico; 505-984-6000; www.sjcsf.edu.
A four-year program of reading, discussion, and writing.
New York
Columbia College, Columbia University, New York, New York; 212-854-2453; www.college.columbia.edu/core/classes/lh.php.
Offers a year-long Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy course.
Oregon
Gutenberg College, Eugene, Oregon; 541-683-5141; www.gutenberg.edu.
A Christian school with a great-books program.
Pennsylvania
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; 215-204-5625; http://temple.edu/ih.
The Intellectual Heritage Program is a great-books sequence; the core curriculum focuses on great books in eight different areas.
Texas
College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas; 940-565-2107; www.engl.unt.edu.
Offers a great-books series through the English department.
Virginia
Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia; 276-944-4121; www.ehc.edu/academic/libarts.htm.
Methodist affiliation; offers great-books courses as part of the liberal arts curriculum.
Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, Virginia; 434-544-8652; www.lynchburg.edu/symposium.xml.
The Lynchburg College Symposium Readings Program reaches outside the college to encourage reading, writing, and discussion focused on the classics.
Washington
Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington; 509-963-1445; www.cwu.edu/~dhc/books.html.
The William O. Douglas Honors College offers a four-year great-books program.
Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington; 509-527-05111; www.whitman.edu/general_studies.
The General Studies Program offers courses on great books and their world views.
Wisconsin
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; 414-229-1122; www.uwm.edu/Dept/Great_Books.
Offers an undergraduate Great Books Program.
SCHEDULES
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Ninth through twelfth grade |
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2 hrs. per day |
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Read, discuss, write about history and great books. |
RESOURCES
For publisher and catalog addresses, telephone numbers, and other information, see Sources (Appendix 4). Most books can be obtained from any bookstore or library; where we know of a mail-order option, we have provided it.
Basic texts for the four-year rhetoric stage are listed first. A great-books section follows. The list for each year of study is in chronological order. Most of these book are available in standard editions, but where we think a specific edition is particularly good, we have recommended it.
Many of the resources recommended in Chapter 16 are still suitable for high-school students, particularly the Jackdaw portfolios of primary sources. We suggest that you call Jackdaw for a catalog and order any of the packs that look particularly interesting to your student. Check Resources at the end of Chapter 16 for details.
Basic Texts
Armstrong, William H. Study Is Hard Work: The Most Accessible and Lucid Text Available on Acquiring and Keeping Study Skills Through a Lifetime, 2d ed. Boston, Mass.: David R. Godine, 1998.
$11.95.
Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
———. The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
$27.95. Order from any bookstore or from Peace Hill Press.
Bundy, George. You Decide: Applying the Bill of Rights to Real Cases. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Critical Thinking Press, 1992.
$26.99 ($14.99 additional for the teacher’s guide, which is necessary because it contains the Supreme Court decisions). Order from Critical Thinking Press.
Cantor, Norman F. The Civilization of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
$18.95.
Fry, Plantagenet Somerset. History of the World, 3d ed., rev. and updated. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2007.
$39.99. Order from any bookstore.
Grun, Bernard, and Daniel J. Boorstin. The Timetables of History. 4th rev. ed. New York: Touchstone, 2005.
$25.00.
Holt American Government. Austin, Tex.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2002.
$100.75. Order from any bookstore. A high-school standard (you may be able to buy a used 1998 edition, which is not significantly different, for a lower price).
Johnson, Paul. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, rev. ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 2001.
$21.00.
———. The Renaissance: A Short History. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
$12.95.
Murphey, Rhoads. A History of Asia, 5th ed. New York: Longman, 2005.
$88.67.
Rozakis, Laurie. Schaum’s Quick Guide to Writing Great Research Papers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999.
$10.85.
Shaffrey, Mary, and Melanie Fonder. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to American Government, 2d ed. New York: Alpha Books, 2005.
$18.95. Order from any bookstore. An engaging and sometimes irreverent “text” that nevertheless covers all the bases.
Tindall, George, and David Shi. America: A Narrative History, Brief Seventh Edition (Single Volume). New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
$50.00. This book comes in various volumes and editions; for high-school students, get the one-volume brief edition.
For Additional History Reading
Daugherty, James. The Magna Carta. Sandwich, Mass.: Beautiful Feet Books, 1998.
$11.95. Order from American Home-School Publishing.
Davis, William S. A Day in Old Athens. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1960.
$18.00. Order from American Home-School Publishing.
———. A Day in Old Rome. New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1963.
$25.00. Order from American Home-School Publishing.
———. Life in Elizabethan Days. New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1994.
$25.00. Order from American Home-School Publishing.
———. Life in a Medieval Barony. New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1990.
$25.00. Order from American Home-School Publishing.
Fairbank, John King, and Merle Goldman. China: A New History, 2d enlarged ed. New York: Belknap Press, 2006.
$21.00. Order from any bookstore.
Howarth, David. 1066: The Year of Conquest. New York: Viking Penguin, 1981.
$14.00. Order from any bookstore.
Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
$20.00. Order from any bookstore.
Keay, John. India: A History. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
$19.95. Order from any bookstore.
Lee, Ki-Baik. A New History of Korea. Trans. Edward W. Wagner. Boston, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.
$19.95. Order from any bookstore.
Marrin, Albert. America and Vietnam: The Elephant and the Tiger. Sandwich, Mass.: Beautiful Feet Books, 2002.
$13.95. Order from The Book Peddler. Marrin’s history books are excellent for beginning historians; they offer readable overviews of complex events, driven by a strong narrative style.
———. Empires Lost and Won: The Spanish Heritage in the Southwest. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
$19.00. Order from any bookstore.
———. George Washington and the Founding of a Nation. Dutton, 2003.
$14.99. Order from American Home-School Publishing.
———. Stalin: Russia’s Man of Steel. Sandwich, Mass.: Beautiful Feet Books, 2002.
$13.95. Order from The Book Peddler.
Meyer, Milton W. Japan: A Concise History, 3d ed. Lanham, Md.: Littlefield Adams, 1992.
$16.95. Order from any bookstore.
Morgan, Kenneth O., ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
$31.95. Order from any bookstore.
Roberts, John Morris. The New Penguin History of the World. 5th ed., rev. and updated. New York: Penguin, 2007.
$22.00. Order from any bookstore.
Additional Great-Books Resources
Cliffs Notes. New York: Wiley Publishing.
Most bookstores stock these distinctive yellow paperbacks, which offer summaries and brief critical analyses. Visit www.cliffsnotes.com for a complete list of available notes.
Guinness, Os, and Louise Cowan. Invitation to the Classics. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1998.
$34.99. Offers historical background on fifty Western classics and evaluates them from a Protestant Christian perspective.
Pink Monkey Notes. www.pinkmonkey.com.
This online alternative to Cliffs Notes offers good summaries and critical considerations.
Online Resources
Escondido Tutorial Service. 2634 Bernardo Avenue, Escondido, Calif. 92029; www.gbt.org.
Offers year-long tutorials in the great books from a Reformed Protestant perspective; also serves as a gateway to a number of other tutorial services and courses.
Oxford Tutorials. 6500 NE 192nd Place, Kenmore, Wash. 98028; 425-402-9624; www.oxfordtutorials.com.
Courses in Shakespeare, Latin, and logic, as well as in the core great books.
Schola Tutorials. P.O. Box 546, Potlatch, Idaho 83855; 208-301-2637; www.schola-tutorials.org.
Great books as well as Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and other subjects; taught from a Reformed Protestant perspective.
Great Books
Any titles listed without mentioning a specific edition can be easily located in standard editions. We’ve supplied ordering information where possible, but texts can also be bought through bookstores or online book services. In addition, public libraries should carry almost all of these titles.
The easiest way to read great books is to buy a Norton anthology—the standard collection of classic works between two covers, all properly annotated. These are great reference works, but, like all reference works, they are unwieldy and have very small print. Your student won’t read these in bed or in the car, only at a desk or table. We think you should use individual texts where possible because they’re easier to read and more fun. Also, some works that you’ll want to read in full are only excerpted in the anthologies. But consider investing in the Norton anthologies to fill in the gaps. You can also buy instructor’s manuals with discussion questions and guides—an extremely valuable resource.
Baym, Nina, gen. ed., et al. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2002.
$62.50 per package. Order from W. W. Norton or through any bookstore. This anthology is divided into five volumes (A–E) but ships in two packages, each of which has its own ISBN.
Package 1 (Volumes A, B): Literature to 1865. From the explorers and settlers through Whitman; includes the American Founding Fathers. Package 2 (Volumes C, D, E): 1865 to Present. From Clemens through the modern poets.
Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
$62.50 for each volume. Order from W. W. Norton or through any bookstore.
Volume 1: The Middle Ages through the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century.
Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century.
Lawall, Sarah, et al. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
$62.50 for each volume. Order from W. W. Norton or through any bookstore.
Previous editions, called The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, can be bought used.
Volume 1.
Volume 2.
Ancients, 5000 B.C.–A.D. 400 (Ninth Grade)
Bible: Genesis—Book of Job.
Use a modern version for clarity. The New International Version is colloquial and clear; the New American Standard Bible is more stilted and also more literal.
Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2500 B.C.).
Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse. Trans. David Ferry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.
Homer, Iliad and Odyssey (c. 850 B.C.).
Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Sophocles, Oedipus the King (490 B.C.).
Sophocles. The Oedipus Cycle. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald and Dudley Fitts. San Diego: Harvest Books, 2002.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon (c. 458 B.C.).
Aeschylus. Aeschylus I: The Oresteia. Trans. David R. Slavitt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Herodotus, The Histories (c. 441 B.C.).
Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Euripides, Medea (c. 431 B.C.).
Euripides. Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen. Trans. James Morwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Aristophanes, The Birds (c. 400 B.C.).
Aristophanes. Aristophanes I: Clouds, Wasps, Birds. Trans. Peter Meineck. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (c. 400 B.C.).
The Landmark Thucydides. Trans. Richard Crawley. New York: Free Press, 1998.
Plato, The Republic (c. 375 B.C.).
Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Viking Press, 1976.
Aristotle, On Poetics (350 B.C.).
Aristotle. Aristotle on Poetics. Trans. Seth Benardete. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine Press, 2002.
Aristotle, Rhetoric (c. 350 B.C.).
Bible: Book of Daniel (c. 165 B.C.).
Horace, Odes (c. 65 B.C.).
New Translations by Contemporary Poets. Ed. J. D. McClatchy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (c. 60 B.C.).
Cicero, De republica (54 B.C.).
Virgil, Aeneid (c. 30 B.C.).
Ovid, Metamorphoses (c. A.D. 5).
Bible: Corinthians 1 and 2 (c. A.D. 58).
Josephus, Wars of the Jews (c. A.D. 68).
Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (c. A.D. 100).
Plutarch. Roman Lives: A Selection of Eight Lives. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Plutarch. Greek Lives: A Selection of Nine Lives. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Tacitus, Annals (c. A.D. 117).
Athanasius, On the Incarnation (c. A.D. 300).
Medieval/Early Renaissance, 400–1600 (Tenth Grade)
Augustine, Confessions (c. 411).
Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Augustine, City of God, Book 8 (c. 426).
Abridged ed. Trans. Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (524).
Koran (selections) (c. 650).
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731).
Eds. Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Beowulf (c. 1000).
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Mabinogion (c. 1050).
Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (c. 1090).
Thomas Aquinas, Selected Writings (c. 1273).
Thomas Aquinas. Selected Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Trans. Ralph McInerny. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Dante, The Inferno (1320).
Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
Everyman (14th century).
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1400).
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Pearl: Verse Translations. Trans. Marie Boroff. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (selections) (c. 1400).
Trans. Nevill Coghill. New York: Penguin Books, 2003 (rev. ed.).
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430).
Margery Kempe. The Book of Margery Kempe: A New Translation, Contexts, Criticism. Trans. and ed. Lynn Staley. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur (selections) (c. 1470).
Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince (selections) (1510).
Machiavelli, The Prince (1513).
2d ed. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Thomas More, Utopia (1516).
Trans. Robert M. Adams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.
Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (c. 1520).
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (selections) (1536).
Christopher Marlowe, Faustus (1588).
Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself (1588).
Trans. J. M. Cohen. New York: Penguin, 1988.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590).
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (1599).
William Shakespeare. Julius Caesar: Oxford School Shakespeare. 3d ed. Ed. Roma Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600).
William Shakespeare. Hamlet: Oxford School Shakespeare. Rev. ed. Ed. Roma Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
William Shakespeare, any other plays (c. 1592–1611).
Late Renaissance/Early Modern, 1600–1850 (Eleventh Grade)
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605).
Abridged. Trans. Walter Starkie. New York: Signet, 1987.
King James Bible, Psalms (1611).
John Donne, Divine Meditations (c. 1635).
Rene Descartes, Meditations (1641).
John Milton, Paradise Lost (selections) (1644).
Moliere, Tartuffe (1669).
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670).
The Pensées are lengthy. If you’d prefer an edited version, try Peter Kreeft’s Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained (Fort Collins, Col.: Ignatius Press, 1997). This picks out the most relevant of the Pensées for today’s student and provides discussion.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1679).
John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” or “On the True End of Civil Government” (1690).
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
Edmund Burke, “On American Taxation” (1774).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract” (1762).
Trans. Maurice Cranston. New York: Penguin, 1968.
The Declaration of Independence (1776).
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776).
Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781).
Alexander Hamilton et al., The Federalist (1787–1788).
Constitution of the United States (ratified 1788).
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789).
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (1791).
Thomas Paine, “The Rights of Man” (1792).
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1815).
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818).
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” and other poems (1820s).
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826).
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” and other poems (1832).
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838).
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other stories (1839).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1844).
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847).
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850).
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851).
Modern, 1850–Present Day (Twelfth Grade)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835).
Trans. Manfield and Winthrop; edited and abridged by Richard D. Heffner. New York: Signet, 2001.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (1848).
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851).
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855).
Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest (1830–1886).
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1856).
Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Random House, 2008.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species (1859).
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861).
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1861).
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863).
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877).
Trans. Constance Garnett, rev. Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878).
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879).
Trans. Frank McGuinness. New York: Faber & Faber, 1997.
Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883).
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884).
W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems (1895).
W. B. Yeats. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. 2d rev. ed.. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner’s, 1996.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895).
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1899).
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901).
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902).
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905).
G. K. Chesterton, “The Innocence of Father Brown” (1911).
Wilfrid Owen, Selected Poems (1918).
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (1921).
Robert Frost, “A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes” (Pulitzer, 1924).
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925).
Trans. Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books, 1999.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925).
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (c. 1937).
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Thornton Wilder, Our Town (1938).
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1939).
Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Mariner Books, 1998.
George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945).
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952).
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952).
Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953).
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956).
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (1962).
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Why We Can’t Wait” (1964).
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1974).
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