The Declaration of Independence 1776

U. S. Constitution 1787

The Federalist Papers 10 and 51, 1787-1788

• Federalist Papers 10
• Federalist Paper 51

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835, 1840

Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto of the Communist Party 1848

Elizabeth Candy Stanton, Address at the Seneca Falls Convention and Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, 1848 (see also)

Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” 1852

The People vs. Hall, 1854

Dred Scott v. Sanford 1857

• Constitution Center
• Library of Congress
• Khan Academy

William Graham Sumner, What the Social Classes Owe Each Other 1883

Santa Clara county v. Southern Pacific Railroad 1886

Ida B. Wells, A Red Record, 1895

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women & Economics 1898

Emma Goldman “Marriage and Love” 1910

Emma Goldman, “Woman Suffrage” 1917

Woodrow Wilson, An Address to Several Thousand Foreign-Born Citizens, 1915

Randolph S. Bourne. “Trans-National America” , 1916

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Commonwealth Club Address, 1932

W.E.B. DuBois Black Reconstruction in America 1935 (password-protected PDF)

Korematsu v United States

Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944)

C. Wright Mills, White Collar

The Power Elite (1956)

James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority” from Nobody Knows My Name, 1960

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963)

Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique, (1963) (password-protected PDF)

Vine DeLoria, Custer Died for Your Sins (1969)

Dean Chavers, Alcatraz is Not an Island (1970)

Carl Wittman, “A Gay Manifesto” (1970)

Radicallesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman” (1970)

Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of Positive Woman, excerpt (1977) (password-protected PDF, and see also)

Cherrie Moraga, “La Guera” from This Bridge Called My Back (1981)

James Baldwin “Here Be Dragons” from the Price of the Ticket (1985)

Bowers v. Hardwick (1986)

Patrick J. Buchanan, Address to the Republican Party National Convention (1992)

Ronald Takaki, “Multiculturalism: Battleground or Meeting Ground?” (1993)

Helen Zia, “To Market, To Market, New York Style” 2000. (password-protected PDF)

Winona LaDuke, “Who Owns America?: Minority Land and Community Security” (2002)

Handing v. Rumsfeld (2004)

Header image via Wikimedia

Rights Info

Unless otherwise noted, this POLS 1230 Open Educational Resource (OER) was curated by for Brooklyn College in 2019 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. [Detailed license and acknowledgement]