First Essay Topic (
PDF)
Second Essay Topic (
PDF)
Semi-Optional Film Series/Project (PDF)
Week #1 (
PDF)
- Nzinga Mbemba (Affonso I). "Letters to the King of Portugal" (1526).
- Unnamed author. "Letter to the King and Queen of Spain."
Week #2 (PDF)
Bartolomé de Las Casas. Excerpts from Apologia (ca. 1548-1550), translated into English as In Defense of the Indians.
Diego Durán. Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar (ca. 1580).
Week #3 (PDF)
- Galeote Pereira. "Certain Reports of China…" (1565).
- Tokugawa Iemitsu. "The Edict of 1635 Ordering the Closing of Japan," and "Completion of the Exclusion, 1639."
Week #4 (PDF)
- Documents on Witchcraft Persecutions (1486-1631).
- William Monter. "Women in the Age of the Reformation."
Week #5 (PDF)
- John Locke. The Second Treatise of Government (1698).
- Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania.
Week #6 (PDF)
- Michael Craton. Excerpts from Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (1978).
Week #7 (PDF)
- Excerpts from Paul Beik, ed. The French Revolution.
- Excerpts from Darline Gay Levy et al., eds. Women in Revolutionary Paris.
- Excerpts from George F. Tyson, ed. Toussaint L'Ouverture.
Week #8 (PDF)
- Documents from British Parliamentary Committees during the "Industrial Revolution" (1832, 1842).
- William Blake. "Chimney Sweeper," "London," and "The Human Abstract" (1794).
Week #9 (PDF)
- Karl Marx. Excerpts from Capital. Vol. 1 (1867).
- Iwasaki Yataro. "Letter to Mitsubishi Employees" (1876).
Week #10 (PDF)
- Roger Casement. "Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of British Colonial Subjects and Native Indians Employed in the Collection of Rubber in the Putumayo District" (1911).
Week #11 (PDF)
- Ivan Turgenev. Excerpts from Fathers and Sons (original Russian edition 1861; translation 1867). Chap. 1-10.
- Vera Figner. Part I from Five Sisters.
Week #12 (PDF)
- W. E. B. DuBois. "The Concept of Race" (1940), and "The Damnation of Women" (1920).
Week #13 (PDF)
- V. I. Lenin. Excerpts from "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government" (1918).
- Miklós Haraszti. Excerpts from A Worker in a Worker's State, and "The Culture of Censorship."
Week #14 (PDF)
- Patrick Buchanan. Excerpts from Death of the West (2002).