Traditions: Humanities Readings through the Ages

Traditions: Humanities Readings through the Ages

Available through McGraw-Hill’s Primis Online
- An Introduction to the Work accompanies each selection and is optional.
- Lengthy works (novels, plays, etc.) are available by individual section (chapter, Act, etc).

FIRST CIVILIZATIONS

Ancient Egypt, The Book of the Dead (excerpt)
Ancient India, The Bhagavad-Gita
Ancient Maya, Popul Vuh (excerpt)
Babylon, Code of Hammurabi
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Mesopotamia, Epic of Gilgamesh (excerpt)

CLASSICISM: GREECE

Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Euripides, Electra
Euripides, Medea
Euripides, Trojan Women
Hesiod, Creation Story (Theogony)
Homer, Iliad
Plato, Crito
Plato, The Republic
Sophocles, Antigone
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

BEYOND THE WEST: WORLD HISTORY, RELIGIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES

Confucius, The Analects
Hindu Tradition, The Upanishads

THE AGE OF THE RENAISSANCE

Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (Prologue; The Miller's Tale)
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Christine Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies (excerpt)

REFORMATION

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (excerpt)
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 2: "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 12: "When I do count the clock that tells the time,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 20: "A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29: "When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 40: "Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 53: "What is your substance, whereof are you made,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 55: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 71: "No longer mourn for me when I am dead,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73: "That time of year thou mayst in me behold,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94: "They that have power to hurt, and will do none,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 129: "Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130: "My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,"
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146: "Poor soul the centre of my sinful earth,"

NEW WORLDS AND ENCOUNTERS

James Cook, The Three Voyages of Captain James Cook (excerpt)
Marco Polo, Travels of Marco Polo (excerpt)
Vaclav Prutky, Prutky’s Travels in Ethiopia (excerpt)

THE AGE OF THE BAROQUE

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
John Donne, Meditation XVII
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Blaise Pascal, Selection from Pensées

ENLIGHTENMENT

Olaudah Equiano, from Travels (excerpt)
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Thomse Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Phillis Wheatley, "An Hymn to the Evening"
Phillis Wheatley, "On Being Brought from Africa to America"
Phillis Wheatley, "On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield"
Phillis Wheatley, "To His Excellency General Washington"
Phillis Wheatley, "To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works"
Phillis Wheatley, "To the University of Cambridge, in New-England"
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

ROMANTICISM

Lord Byron, Don Juan
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Brahma”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — I: History
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — II: Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — IV: Spiritual Laws
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — V: Love
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — VI: Friendship
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — VII: Prudence
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — VIII: Heroism
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — IX: The Over-Soul
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — X: Circles
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — XI: Intellect
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays First Series — XII: Art
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Second Series — XIII: The Poet
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Second Series — XIV: Experience
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Second Series — XV: Character
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Second Series — XVI: Manners
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Second Series — XVII: Gifts
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Second Series — XVIII: Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Second Series — XIX: Politics
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Second Series — XX: Nominalist and Realist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life (excerpt)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass—“Song of Myself”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass—“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass—“Drum Taps”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

INDUSTRIALISM AND REALISM

Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
Karl Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto
John Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Women
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

MODERNISM

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (excerpt)
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (excerpt)
Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

GLOBALISM AND THE INFORMATION AGE

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (excerpt)
Gwendolyn Brooks, "a song in the front yard"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "Horses Graze"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Bean Eaters"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Lovers of the Poor"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool"
Langston Hughes, “Weary Blues”
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (excerpt)
Maxine Hong Kingston, “No Name Woman” (excerpt)

Traditions: Humanities Readings through the Ages planned for Primis Online is a new database conceived as both a stand-alone product as well as a companion source to Fiero's The Humanistic Tradition and Landmarks texts and Martin-Jacobus' Humanities through the Arts. All proposed 110 selections slated for inclusion will serve to satisfy both types of Intro to Humanities courses specifically because the database will consist of foundational and theoretical readings. The Traditions database collection is broad in nature, containing both western and non-western readings, as well as both ancient and contemporary offerings, which were hand-picked from a number of different disciplines, such as literature, philosophy, and science. The flexibility of Primis Online's database allows the readings to be arranged both chronologically and by genre. This dual organization will go a long way in pairing this database with the Fiero and Martin-Jacobus' texts.