Most of the works we read during this past academic year aren’t listed under the curriculum outline submitted to the school district in the summer of 2010. At the time, I couldn’t foresee the literature that would best enhance our studies. Preferring to work organically, I selected reading material as we moved along, based on Allegra’s interests and what we were studying at any given point. Here’s what we actually read:
Historical documents
Capt. John Smith’s The General History of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles (excerpts)
Mayflower Compact, William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation versus Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (excerpts)
Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World (excerpts pertaining to Salem witch trials)
Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (excerpts), The Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers (excerpts), the Preamble to the US Constitution,
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Poetry
Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Philip Freneau, Phillis Wheatley, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman
Short stories
“Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, “A New England Nun” by Mary Wilkins Freeman, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” by Mark Twain
Slave narratives
Excerpts from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Books in entirety
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (for biography/autobiography)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
The Story of the Amistad by Emma Gelders Sterne
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott (for geometry and social commentary)
