Graduation / Maya Angelou --
The torture myth / Anne Applebaum --
Recipe / Nicholson Baker --
Stranger in the village / James Baldwin --
Paying for freedom / Michael Bérubé --
I want a wife / Judy Brady --
Why don't we complain? / William F. Buckley Jr. --
A fable for tomorrow / Rachel Carson --
One side can be wrong / Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne --
On keeping a notebook / Joan Didion --
The stunt pilot / Annie Dillard.
Learning to read / Frederick Douglass --
In defense of talk shows / Barbara Ehrenreich --
Z : the movie that changed my life / Louise Erdrich --
The median isn't the message / Stephen Jay Gould --
Speech in Pennsylvania Hall / Angelina Grimké --
The myth of "moderation" in religion / Sam Harris --
How dictionaries are made / S.I. Hayakawa --
Daddy's philosophy / Jim Hightower --
How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston --
What I did to Morris Udall / Molly Ivins --
The Declaration of Independence / Thomas Jefferson --
On the death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. / Robert F. Kennedy --
Letter from Birmingham Jail / Martin Luther King Jr. --
No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston --
The human cost of an illiterate society / Jonathan Kozol --
Time lines / Lewis Lapham --
First inaugural address / Abraham Lincoln --
The Gettysburg Address / Abraham Lincoln --
Bodies in motion and at rest / Thomas Lynch --
A homemade education / Malcolm X --
An American land ethic / N. Scott Momaday.
Shooting an elephant / George Orwell --
On 9/11, innocence was lost once again / Leonard Pitts --
Why boys don't play with dolls / Katha Pollitt --
A time for choosing / Ronald Reagan --
"Blaxicans" and other reinvented Americans / Richard Rodriguez --
The unpatriotic academy / Richard Rorty --
Abortion in India / Salman Rushdie --
Letter to President Pierce / Chief Seattle --
Me talk pretty one day / David Sedaris --
Declaration of sentiments and resolutions / Elizabeth Cady Stanton --
Black men and public space / Brent Staples --
A modest proposal / Jonathan Swift --
Mother tongue / Amy Tan --
Conversational styles / Deborah Tannen --
Civil disobedience / Henry David Thoreau --
University days / James Thurber --
In search of our mothers' gardens / Alice Walker --
Listening / Eudora Welty --
Once more to the lake / E.B. White --
Virtues versus values / George Will --
In search of a room of one's own / Virginia Woolf --
College pressures / William Zinsser.
