Words of Ages

Explorers and early settlers -- The general history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles / John Smith -- The history and present state of Virginia / Robert Beverley -- Of Plymouth Plantation / William Bradford -- "A model of Christian charity" / John Winthrop -- "In memory of my dear grandchild Anne Bradstreet" / Anne Bradstreet -- "The minister's black veil" / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Voices of a revolution -- "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" / Jonathan Edwards -- "The way to wealth" / Benjamin Franklin -- "Considerations on keeping Negroes" / John Woolman -- "The last of the Mohicans: a narrative of 1757" / James Fenimore Cooper -- Common sense / Thomas Paine -- Declaration of independence / Thomas Jefferson -- personal letters / John Adams & Abigail Adams -- The search for a national identity -- "On the emigration to America and peopling the western country" / Philip Freneau -- "Federalist no.2" / John Jay -- "The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano" / Olaudah Equiano -- The history of the Lewis and Clark expedition / Meriwether Lewis & William Clark -- A tour on the prairies / Washington Irving -- "Tecumseh's plea to the Choctaws and the Chickasaws" / Tecumseh -- The shackles of power: three Jeffersonian decades / John Dos Passos. A confident nation -- "The young American" / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- "Resistance to civil government" / Henry David Thoreau -- Woman in the nineteenth century / Margaret Fuller -- "Great are the myths" / Walt Whitman -- "Annexation" / John L. O'Sullivan -- Personal memoirs / Juan Nepomuceno Seguin -- Slavery and the abolition movement -- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass / Frederick Douglass -- Incidents in the life of a slave girl / Harriet Jacobs -- Uncle Tom's cabin / Harrriet Beecher Stowe -- Sociology for the South / George Fitzhugh -- "Appeal to the Christian women of the South" / Angelina Grimke Weld -- "The hunters of men" / John Greenleaf Whittier -- Civil war and reconstruction -- "The portent" / Herman Melville -- The red badge of courage: an episode of the American Civil War / Stephen Crane -- "Hospital sketches" / Louisa May Alcott -- "O Captain! My Captain!" / Walt Whitman -- "Up from slavery" / Booker T. Washington -- The souls of Black folk / W.E.B. DuBois. Industrializing America -- The closing of the frontier -- O pioneers! / Willa Cather -- "Chiquita" / Bret Harte -- The life and adventure of Nat Love, better known in the cattle country as Deadwood Dick / Nat Love -- "Kansas I" / A Mexican Folk Ballad -- "The passing of the buffalo" / Hamlin Garland -- Black Elk speaks / Black Elk -- Artists render industrialization and urbanization -- "What the engines said" / Bret Harte -- "Life in the iron mills" / Rebecca Harding Davis -- The age of innocence / Edith Wharton -- "Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge" / Hart Crane -- Yekl: a tale of the New York ghetto / Abraham Cahan -- "Chicago" / Carl Sandburg -- Social critics and reformers -- "We are all bound up together" / Francis E. Watkins Harper -- Eighty years and more: reminiscences 1815-1897 / Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- "A church mouse" / Mary Wilkins Freeman -- Huckleberry Finn / Samuel L. Clemens -- The shame of the cities / Lincoln Steffens -- The jungle / Upton Sinclair. Americans abroad and World War I -- The portrait of a lady / Henry James -- "The white man's burden" / Rudyard Kipling -- "The real 'white man's burden'" / Ernest Crosby -- "Hallelujahs" / Jose de Diego -- One of ours / Willa Cather -- "next to of course god america i" / E. E. Cummings -- Democracy and adversity -- The jazz age -- The great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- "Song of perfect propriety" / Dorothy Parker -- The flivver king / Upton Sinclair -- Jazz / Toni Morrison -- "The weary blues" / Langston Hughes -- Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neale Hurston -- The Great Depression and the New Deal -- The big money / John Dos Passos -- Waiting for Lefty / Clifford Odets -- "Women on the breadlines" / Meridel LeSueur -- The grapes of wrath / John Steinbeck -- "Colonial Park" / Ralph Ellison -- "Proud day" / Genevieve Taggard. World War II -- "Freedom" / E. B. White -- Battle cry / Leon Uris -- Farewell to Manzanar / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston -- "Apostrophe to the land" / Countee Cullen -- The face of war / Martha Gellhorn -- Night / Elie Wiesel -- Hiroshima / John Hershey -- The challenges of power -- Prosperity and anxiety -- An American childhood / Annie Dillard -- The man in the gray flannel suit / Sloan Wilson -- On the road / Jack Kerouac -- Coming of age in Mississippi / Anne Moody -- The cruicible / Arthur Miller -- The right stuff / Tom Wolfe -- Rights and revolutions -- "Letter from a Birmingham jail" / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- "Message to the grass roots" / Malcolm X -- "Why I want a wife" / Judy Brady -- The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros -- Lakota woman / Mary Crow Dog -- "Blowin' in the wind" / Bob Dylan -- The Vietnam years -- One very hot day / David Halberstam -- Going after Cacciato / Tim O'Brien -- "Life at war" / Denise Levertov -- American pastoral / Philip Roth -- "Letters from my father" / Robert Olen Butler.