Available Readings
LETTERS:
Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776
http://www.masshist.org/DIGITALADAMS/AEA/cfm/doc.cfm?id=L17760414ja
"Proper Place for Sports" by Theodore Roosevelt http://www.bartleby.com/53/29.html
A letter from Alice Walker to American President Bill Clinton
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/awalker.html
A letter from E.B. White (author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little) to his readers.
http://www.teachervision.fen.com/authors/letters-and-journals/1734.html
SPEECHES:
Tony Blair's 1998 Address to Irish Parliament http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/blair.htm
"A Den of Thieves" by Patrick J. Buchanan http://www.buchanan.org/pa-00-0331-opecspeech.html
William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Speech http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/lib_nobel.html
The Future of the Novel by Peter James http://www.peterjames.com/articles_futurenovel.htm
Cuban Missile Crisis Address to the Nation by Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkcubanmissilecrisis.html
Anna Quindlen's Commencement Speech at Mount Holyoke College http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/oped/Quindlen.shtml
Shuttle “Challenger” Disaster Address by Former U.S. President Ronald W. Reagan
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganchallenger.htm
Seneca Chief Red Jacket's Address to White Missionaries and Iroquois Six Nations
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/nativeamericans/chiefredjacket.htm
Speech delivered by Wole Soyinka at the Nobel Banquet on December 10th, 1986
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1986/soyinka-speech.html
"Why My Dog Is Not a Humanist" by Kurt Vonnegut http://www.vonnegutweb.com/archives/arc_humanist.html
"The Fourteen Points" by Former U.S. President T. Woodrow Wilson
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/wilsonfourteenpoints.htm
ESSAYS:
"Of Truth" by Francis Bacon http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/mike_donnelly/lotone.htm#truth
"That Blasted Year" by Dave Barry http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/27/AR2006122701734.html
"The True Story of American Soccer" by Dave Eggers http://www.slate.com/id/2142554/
Vaclav Havel's "The Quiver of a Shrub in California"
http://www.cunepress.com/cunepress/booksonline/essays/etg/etg-pages/e-q/havel.htm#essay
"American Dreamer" by Bharati Mukherjee http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/1997/01/mukherjee.html
from Jazz by Toni Morrison http://www.tribes.org/cgi-bin/form.pl?karticle=671
"Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan http://www.people.virginia.edu/~pmc4b/spring98/readings/Mother.html
"The Clan of the One-breasted Women" by Terry Tempest Williams http://www.awakenedwoman.com/tempest_refuge.htm
"The Bee" by Mark Twain http://users.telerama.com/~joseph/bee.html
"Hopper's Polluted Silence" by John Updike http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5006080
"The Way of All Waiting" by S.L. Wisenberg http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/11/09/waiting/
"Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" by Virginia Woolf http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chap29.html
EXCERPTS and SHORT STORIES (you need only select one piece from this section):
From James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone http://www.randomhouse.com/features/baldwin/excerpt.html
From Chapter Six, "Knowledge on Fire," of Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring04/032564excerpt.htm
Dedication to Sir Joshua Ryenolds from Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. by James Boswell http://www.4literature.net/James_Boswell/Life_of_Samuel_Johnson_LL_D_/
"A Fable for Tomorrow": An excerpt from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring http://wilderness.nps.gov/idea61.cfm
From Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/18/180/frameset.html
From Joan Didion's Why I Write http://www.idiom.com/~rick/html/why_i_write.htm
From Noel Riley Fitch's Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child http://www.bookclubs.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385493833&view=excerpt
From Chapter One, "The Middleman," of Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060826581/Oracle_Bones/excerpt.aspx
"Araby" by James Joyce
From Barbara Kingsolver's High Tide in Tucson http://www.kingsolver.com/bookshelf/high_tide_tucson.asp#excerpt
"Second Schmeling Fight" from Joe Louis: My Life, by Joe Louis http://www.barnard.edu/amstud/resources/color_line/louis1938.htm
From Nancy Mairs' Waist-High in the World. Body in Trouble http://www.disabilityculture.org/course/mairs.htm
From David Maraniss's Clement: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5415484
Chapter One of Kay Redfield Jamison's Exuberance: The Passion for Life http://www.enotalone.com/article/4867.html
From When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/romance/spanish/219/13eeuu/santiago.html
From Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago
Excerpt from Chapter One, "The Community Said He was Crazy," of Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4976127
Chapter One, "Why Base Ball has become our National Game - Distinctively American as to its Nativity, Evolution, Development, Spirit and Achievements," from Albert G. Spalding's America's National Game
http://www.barnard.edu/amstud/resources/nationalism/spalding.htm
From Rory Stewart's The Places in Between http://www.rorystewartbooks.com/places_in_between_excerpt.htm
A description of the Bubonic Plague From Barbara Tuchman's work A Distant Mirror
http://www.thecaveonline.com/APEH/Plaguedescription.html
The Atlanta Exposition Address from Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery: An Autobiography