Reading About the World, Volume 2, edited by Paul Brians, Mary Gallwey, Douglas Hughes, Azfar Hussain, Richard Law, Michael Myers Michael Neville, Roger Schlesinger, Alice Spitzer, and Susan Swan.
This anthology prints short selections sharply focussed on major topics of interest to beginning students of World Civilizations. It combines traditional historical sources with literary and philosophical selections.
By clicking on the hotlinks below you can access samples from Reading About the World, Volume 2. The third edition was published by Harcourt Brace Custom Publishing, 1999.
Additional selections not included in the printed version of the reader are marked with an asterisk (*).
Africa 1500-1750
- India 1500-1750
- Mirabai: Songs for Krishna
- Kabir: Selected Songs
- China 1500-1750
- K’ang-Hsi: The Sacred Edicts
- P’u Sung-ling: Painting on the Wall
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- Wu Ch’eng-en: Journey to the West
- Japan 1500-1750
- Basho: Haiku
- Chikamatsu Monzaemon:The Love Suicides at Sonezaki
The Middle East
Europe 1500-1750
- François Rabelais: From Gargantua and Pantagruel
- Desiderius Erasmus: Julius Excluded From Heaven
- Galileo Galilei: On Sunspots
- Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote: Don Quixote vs. the Windmills*
- William Shakespeare: Sonnets
- William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, The Balcony Scene
- Louise Labé: Sonnets
- René Descartes: Discourse on Method*
- William Marshall: Draft of a Poor Law*
- Statement of the Levellers*
Latin America 1500-1750
- Bernal Díaz del Castillo: Discovery and Conquest of Mexico
- Michel de Montaigne: On Cannibals
- Two letters from Spanish Settlers in the “New World”
- Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: “A Response to Jealousy”
- Juan del Valle y Caviedes: The Privileges of the Poor
North America 1500-1750
Africa 1750-1900
India 1750-1900
- Raja Rammohan Roy: On the Practice of Burning Widows Alive
- Lalon Fakir: Songs
- Muddupalani: from Radhika Santwanam (Appeasing Radhika)
- Toru Dutt: Sonnet
China 1750-1900
- Hung Hsiu-Ch’uan: A Visit in Heaven
- Li Ju-chen: The Land of the Great
- Lin Tse-hsü’s letter to Queen Victoria, protesting the opium trade
Japan 1750-1900
- Kaibara Ekken or Kaibara Token: Greater Learning for Women
- Katsu Kokichi: Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai
- Fukuzumi Masae: The “Pill” of the Three Religions
- Fukuzawa Yukichi: Chinese vs. Western Learning
Europe 1750-1900
- Jean Le Rond d’Alembert: Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia*
- Voltaire: A Treatise on Toleration
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: The Social Contract
- Declaration of the Rights of Man
- Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations
- G. W. F. Hegel: Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History
- August Comte: The Positive Philosophy
- John Stuart Mill: On Liberty
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust
- William Wordsworth: The World Is Too Much with Us
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan*
- Emile Zola: Germinal
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto
- Friedrich Nietzsche: The Death of God
- Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
- Rudyard Kipling: The White Man’s Burden
Latin America 1750-1900
- Maria Eugenia Echenique: The Emancipation of Women
- Silvia Fernández: He and She
- Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: A Canary’s Ideas
North America 1750-1900
- Thomas Paine: Profession of Faith
- Abraham Lincoln: Second Inaugural Address
- Mark Twain: An American’s View of Europe
- Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance*
- Walt Whitman: From Song of Myself
- Emily Dickinson
- Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour*
Africa 1900-Present
- Joseph Conrad:Heart of Darkness
- Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
- Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: The Return
- Raage Ugaas: Poet’s Lament on the Death of his Wife
- Léopold Sédar Senghor: Long, long you have held
- Umkhonto we Sizwe (Military wing of the African National Congress): We are at War!
- Nelson Mandela: Inaugural Address
Middle East & North Africa 1900-Present
- Naguib Mahfouz: Half a Day
- Mahmoud Darwish: Identity Card
- The Ayatollah Khomeni: America, the Great Satan
- Faiz Ahmad Faiz: Selected Poems
- Assia Djebar: A Little Arab Girl’s First Day at School
- Nawal El Saadawi: The Veil
South Asia 1900-Present
- Rabindranath Tagore: Once There Was a King
- Mokshodayani Mukhopadhyay: The Bengali Babu
- Mohandas K. Gandhi: Indian Home Rule
- P. Lankesh: Bread
- Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Selected Poems
- Akhtaruzzzaman Elias: Dream Book
- Kishwar Naheed: We Sinful Women
China 1900-Present
- Lu Xun: The Wise Man, the Fool, and the Slave
- K’ang yu-wei: How to Achieve the Great Harmony
- Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung
- Lo Ch’ing: Protest Posters (January 1979)
Japan 1900-Present
- Hirokichi Numajiri: Poverty in a Rural Village
- Hagiwara Sakutaro: Sickly Face at the Bottom of the Ground
- Yasunari Kawabata: The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket
- Masuji Ibuse: Black Rain
Europe 1900-Present
- Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams
- V. I. Lenin: What Is to Be Done?
- Aleksander Solzhenitsin: The Gulag Archipelago
- The Balfour Declaration
- John McCrae: In Flanders Fields
- e. e. cummings: my sweet old etcetera
- William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming
- Adolf Hitler: “Nation and Race” from Mein Kampf
- Marie Sukloff: The Story of an Assassination*
- Elie Wiesel: Night
- Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
Latin America & The Caribbean 1900-Present
- Pablo Neruda: Anguish of Death
- Jorge Luis Borges: The Library of Babel
- Gabriela Mistral: Two Poems
- Silvia Fernández: The Needle and the Pen*
- Juana de Ibarbarou: The Hour
- Rubén Darío: To Roosevelt
- Gabriel García Márquez: The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
- Gustavo Gutiérrez: A Theology of Liberation
- Louise Bennett: Colonization in Reverse
- Derek Walcott: Hurucan
North America 1900-Present
- T. S. Eliot: Preludes
- T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock*
- Robert Frost: After Apple-Picking*
- The Road Not Taken
- H. D. (Hilda Doolittle): Sea Poppies
- Claude McKay: If We Must Die
- Malcolm X: Declaration of Independence
- Gary Snyder: Buddhism and the Coming Revolution
- Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
- Stanley Kauffman: The Necessary Film
- Tim O’Brien: The Man I Killed
- Sherman Alexie: The Trial of Thomas Builds the Fire
*Selections marked are supplementary readings omitted from the 2nd edition of Reading About the World.
Reading About the World, Volume 1
Reading About the World is now out of print. You can search for used copies using the following information:Paul Brians, et al. Reading About the World, Vol. 1, 3rd edition, Harcourt Brace College Publishing: ISBN 0-15-567425-0 or Paul Brians, et al. Reading About the World, Vol. 2, 3rd edition, Harcourt Brace College Publishing: ISBN 0-15-512826-4.
Try Chambal:
http://www.chambal.com/csin/9780155674257/ (vol. 1)
http://www.chambal.com/csin/9780155128262/ (vol. 2)
For all other queries, write Paul Brians at paulbrians@gmail.
Richard Hooker’s World Civilizations reader
Washington State University home page
paulbrians@gmail.com