I am putting together my reading list for Western Civ II next semester. After reading Brad's comment and thinking about cultural literacy and these nuggets of social thought I have decided that I will indeed extend the readings with a set of short documents. I had been planning to give them a text (McKay et all), the Burke-Paine debate (Reflections on the Revolution / Rights of Man) and All Quiet on the Western Front (because it is an unwritten rule, and because I like it better than Storm of Steel).

So, what else do I want to give them - knowing that I will be distributing the reading list as an electronic reader and thus will want to use public domain etexts where-ever possible, for I make typos when I retype things.

Obviously Max Weber and the Protestant Work Ethic - although I will have to cut it down to a reasonable number of words.
Likewise I like to give Marx's Communist Manifesto and a snippet of Rousseau explaining the general will.

Beyond that I will look for readings that will support my larger narratives for the semester: decline of the Ottoman Empire, transition from absolutism to democracy, evolutions in nations and states. It is a very political structure.

Off the top of my head I am thinking:

• Jean Calvin - something from Institutes, but what?
  
• John Hobbes - something from Leviathan on the state of nature and why we need absolute government
  
• excerpts from the House of Commons hearings on work conditions in England during the First Industrial Revolution. Make sure this is a woman's story.
  
• A Russian short story - Dostoevsky or Gogol
  
• Speeches by Hitler and Mussolini, including a link to some of the streaming Hitler video on the web.
  
• Something from the Russian Revolution - Lenin? Trotsky? A bit from Quiet flows the Don?
  
• Lili Marlene (because the survey is all about the cliches)
  
• Kipling poems about imperialism - White Man's Burden, one other TBA (but not When the Widow Gave the Party because that one confused the kids last semester.)
  
• A chapter from a French 19th century women's novel - but which one? My first thought was Madame Bovary, but that was written by a guy. I know the British much better than the French.

The problem I have is that I am very strong on political theory, strong on 18th and 19th-century history, weak on the early stuff, and weak on primary documents in European women's history.

In addition, I don't have a lot of time to put into this. I am adding primary documents because I know myself, and know that I will twitch and fret if I don't have them during the semester, but I don't want to get bogged down creating this reader the way I got bogged down creating my US1 reader this summer.

Still, it makes a nice down-time think project.

Posted by Red Ted at November 19, 2004 12:03 PM | TrackBack