Ideas across Time Book

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: AMERICAN IDENTITY

Joel L. Swerdlow, Changing America (Keynote)

St. John De Crevecoeur, What is an American?

James Baldwin, The Discovery of What It Means To Be An American

Mary Gordon, The Ghosts of Ellis Island

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Silent Dancing

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003

CHAPTER TWO: BELIEF

Gregory Rodriguez, Catholic Confession (Keynote)

Selections from the King James Bible

Selections from the Qur’an

Selections from the Analects of Confucius

Selections from the Rig Veda and the Upanishads

Tom Paine, What I Believe

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Book of Genesis

Friedrich Nietzsche, God is Dead

William James, The Will to Believe

Paul Tillich, The Lost Dimension in Religion

Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness

Karen Armstrong, History and Religion

Images of Divinity

CHAPTER THREE: SCIENCE

Rosie Mestel, Of Mice and Men: We’re Quite Similar, Genetically (Keynote)

Francis Bacon, Sphinx, or science

Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein

Charles Darwin, from The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man

Stephen Jay Gould, Introduction to Darwin

Luther Standing Bear, Nature

Albert Einstein, Letters to and From Children

Richard Feynman, The Value of Science

Annie Dillard, Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos

Sherry Turkle, How Computers Change The Way We Think

Photo, Qafzeh skull in Times Square

CHAPTER FOUR: ECONOMIC LIFE

Craig S. Smith, China Juggles the Conflicting Pressures of a Society in Transition (Keynote)

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Louisa May Alcott, How I Went Out to Service

Album: Money Matters.

Six brief passages about money from Christopher Columbus, Henry Mayhew, W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, Edward Bellamy, and Dana Gioia.

Studs Terkle, Mike Lefevre

Peter Singer, The Singer Solution to World Poverty

Barbara Ehrenreich, Selling in Minnesota

Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History

“American Values” (advertisement) and “Signs of the Times” (photo)

CHAPTER FIVE: DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

Fareed Zakaria, The Democratic Age (Keynote)

Niccolo Machiavelli, On the Exercise of Power

John Locke, from The Second Treatise of Civil Government

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

Mary Wollstonecraft, The Rights and Involved Duties of Mankind Considered

Henry Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Letter on Democracy

Daniel J. Boorstin, Technology and Democracy

Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

Benjamin Barber, Jihad Vs. McWorld

Gish Jen, In the American Society

David Hume Kennerly, Photographs Across America

CHAPTER SIX: EQUALITY: RACE AND GENDER

Gloria Goodale, Black and White (Keynote)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Origin of Inequality

Alexis de Tocqueville, Equality and Individualism

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings

Simone de Beauvoir, What is a Woman?

Betty Friedan, The Problem Without a Name

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

bell hooks, Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression

Richard Rodriguez, Brown

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

Nostalgic Barbie

CHAPTER SEVEN: ART

Dan Barry and Carol Vogel, Guiliani Vows To Cut Subsidy Over ‘Sick’ Art (Keynote)

Plato, from The Republic

Aristotle, from Poetics

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Art

Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Meyer Schapiro, The Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show

Illustration: Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase

Susan Sontag, A Century of Cinema

N. Scott Momaday, The Arrowmaker

Sandra Cisneros, Little Miracles, Kept Promises

CHAPTER EIGHT: DEATH AND DYING

Studs Terkel, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (Keynote)

Socrates, Apology

Marcus Aurelius, from The Meditations

Virginia Woolf, The Death of a Moth

Album: “Where are the snows of Yesteryear?”: Some Thoughts on Death and Dying (1450-2001)

Francois Villon, The Ballad of Dead Ladies

Emily Dickinson, The Last Night That She Lived

Emily Dickinson, Because I Could Not Stop For Death

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Anne Sexton, Imitations of Drowning

Angelina Rossi, Mothers and Sons

Rick Rundle, The Stranger

Carlos Cortez, The Day of the Dead

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, On the Fear of Death

Yukio Mishima, from The Way of the Samurai

Leslie Marmon Silko, From A High Arid Plateau in New Mexico Death among the Pueblo People

Sherwin B. Nuland, Suicide and Euthanasia

Photos from the Paris Catacombs