Explorers and early settlers --
The general history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles / John Smith --
The history and present state of Virginia / Robert Beverley --
Of Plymouth Plantation / William Bradford --
"A model of Christian charity" / John Winthrop --
"In memory of my dear grandchild Anne Bradstreet" / Anne Bradstreet --
"The minister's black veil" / Nathaniel Hawthorne --
Voices of a revolution --
"Sinners in the hands of an angry God" / Jonathan Edwards --
"The way to wealth" / Benjamin Franklin --
"Considerations on keeping Negroes" / John Woolman --
"The last of the Mohicans: a narrative of 1757" / James Fenimore Cooper --
Common sense / Thomas Paine --
Declaration of independence / Thomas Jefferson --
personal letters / John Adams & Abigail Adams --
The search for a national identity --
"On the emigration to America and peopling the western country" / Philip Freneau --
"Federalist no.2" / John Jay --
"The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano" / Olaudah Equiano --
The history of the Lewis and Clark expedition / Meriwether Lewis & William Clark --
A tour on the prairies / Washington Irving --
"Tecumseh's plea to the Choctaws and the Chickasaws" / Tecumseh --
The shackles of power: three Jeffersonian decades / John Dos Passos. A confident nation --
"The young American" / Ralph Waldo Emerson --
"Resistance to civil government" / Henry David Thoreau --
Woman in the nineteenth century / Margaret Fuller --
"Great are the myths" / Walt Whitman --
"Annexation" / John L. O'Sullivan --
Personal memoirs / Juan Nepomuceno Seguin --
Slavery and the abolition movement --
Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass / Frederick Douglass --
Incidents in the life of a slave girl / Harriet Jacobs --
Uncle Tom's cabin / Harrriet Beecher Stowe --
Sociology for the South / George Fitzhugh --
"Appeal to the Christian women of the South" / Angelina Grimke Weld --
"The hunters of men" / John Greenleaf Whittier --
Civil war and reconstruction --
"The portent" / Herman Melville --
The red badge of courage: an episode of the American Civil War / Stephen Crane --
"Hospital sketches" / Louisa May Alcott --
"O Captain! My Captain!" / Walt Whitman --
"Up from slavery" / Booker T. Washington --
The souls of Black folk / W.E.B. DuBois. Industrializing America --
The closing of the frontier --
O pioneers! / Willa Cather --
"Chiquita" / Bret Harte --
The life and adventure of Nat Love, better known in the cattle country as Deadwood Dick / Nat Love --
"Kansas I" / A Mexican Folk Ballad --
"The passing of the buffalo" / Hamlin Garland --
Black Elk speaks / Black Elk --
Artists render industrialization and urbanization --
"What the engines said" / Bret Harte --
"Life in the iron mills" / Rebecca Harding Davis --
The age of innocence / Edith Wharton --
"Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge" / Hart Crane --
Yekl: a tale of the New York ghetto / Abraham Cahan --
"Chicago" / Carl Sandburg --
Social critics and reformers --
"We are all bound up together" / Francis E. Watkins Harper --
Eighty years and more: reminiscences 1815-1897 / Elizabeth Cady Stanton --
"A church mouse" / Mary Wilkins Freeman --
Huckleberry Finn / Samuel L. Clemens --
The shame of the cities / Lincoln Steffens --
The jungle / Upton Sinclair. Americans abroad and World War I --
The portrait of a lady / Henry James --
"The white man's burden" / Rudyard Kipling --
"The real 'white man's burden'" / Ernest Crosby --
"Hallelujahs" / Jose de Diego --
One of ours / Willa Cather --
"next to of course god america i" / E. E. Cummings --
Democracy and adversity --
The jazz age --
The great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald --
"Song of perfect propriety" / Dorothy Parker --
The flivver king / Upton Sinclair --
Jazz / Toni Morrison --
"The weary blues" / Langston Hughes --
Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neale Hurston --
The Great Depression and the New Deal --
The big money / John Dos Passos --
Waiting for Lefty / Clifford Odets --
"Women on the breadlines" / Meridel LeSueur --
The grapes of wrath / John Steinbeck --
"Colonial Park" / Ralph Ellison --
"Proud day" / Genevieve Taggard. World War II --
"Freedom" / E. B. White --
Battle cry / Leon Uris --
Farewell to Manzanar / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston --
"Apostrophe to the land" / Countee Cullen --
The face of war / Martha Gellhorn --
Night / Elie Wiesel --
Hiroshima / John Hershey --
The challenges of power --
Prosperity and anxiety --
An American childhood / Annie Dillard --
The man in the gray flannel suit / Sloan Wilson --
On the road / Jack Kerouac --
Coming of age in Mississippi / Anne Moody --
The cruicible / Arthur Miller --
The right stuff / Tom Wolfe --
Rights and revolutions --
"Letter from a Birmingham jail" / Martin Luther King, Jr. --
"Message to the grass roots" / Malcolm X --
"Why I want a wife" / Judy Brady --
The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros --
Lakota woman / Mary Crow Dog --
"Blowin' in the wind" / Bob Dylan --
The Vietnam years --
One very hot day / David Halberstam --
Going after Cacciato / Tim O'Brien --
"Life at war" / Denise Levertov --
American pastoral / Philip Roth --
"Letters from my father" / Robert Olen Butler.