Special Collections
Grade 11 and 12 Common Core Text Exemplars
Description: These books exemplify the level of complexity that Common Core State Standards require students to engage with. While the choices serve to help educators select texts of similar complexity, quality, and range, this not a required reading list. #teachers
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The American Reader
by Diane RavitchThe American Reader is a stirring and memorable anthology that captures the many facets of American culture and history in prose and verse. The 200 poems, speeches, songs, essays, letters, and documents were chosen both for their readability and for their significance.
These are the words that have inspired, enraged, delighted, chastened, and comforted Americans in days gone by. Gathered here are the writings that illuminate -- with wit, eloquence, and sometimes sharp words -- significant aspects of national conciousness. They reflect the part that all Americans -- black and white, native born and immigrant, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, poor and wealthy -- have played in creating the nation's character.
[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in History and Social Studies in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
Walden
by Henry David ThoreauTo celebrate the 150th anniversary of the original publication of Thoreau's classic work (which is cited in Books for College Libraries, 3rd ed.), this special edition is published in cooperation with the Walden Woods Project, a nonprofit organization founded in 1990 to preserve the land, literature, and legacy of Thoreau. The text includes a brief introduction by E. O. Wilson.
[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
Democracy in America
by Alexis De TocquevilleOriginally penned in the mid-eighteenth century by Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America remains the most penetrating and astute picture of American life, politics, and morals ever written, as relevant today as when it first appeared in print nearly two hundred years ago. This edition, meticulously edited by the distinguished de Tocqueville scholar J. P. Mayer, is widely recognized as the preeminent translation.
[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in History and Social Studies in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
Black Boy
by Richard WrightRichard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about taverns.
Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot.
Black Boy is Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South.
It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment-a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.
[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]