Suggestions for Topics

.Images of the New World:

John Smith, The General History of Virginia

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
Thomas Morton; Sarak Kemble Knight
Thoreau, Walking

.Images of Native Americans:

Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity; Franklin, Remarks Concerning the Savages of
North America; Samsom Occom, from A Short Narrative of My Life; Freneau, The Indian
Burying Ground; Handsome Lake, How America Was Discovered; Irving, from A History of
New York; William Apess, An Indians Looking-Glass for the White Man, Seattle, Speech of
Chief Seattle

.Nature, American Landscape, The Prairies, The Wilderness

Freneau, The Wild Honey Suckle; William C. Bryant, The Yellow Violet, To a Waterfowl,
The Prairies; Emerson, Nature, The Rhodora, The Snowstorm

.Religion:

Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation; Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity;

Bradstreet, Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House; Rowlandson, A
Narrative of the Captivity; Cotton Mather, The Trial of Bridget Bishop; Edwards, Sinners in
the hands of an Angry God; Franklin, The AutobiographyPart 2, A Witch Trial at Mount
Holly; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

.Race, Slavery, Abolitionism:

Equiano, The Interesting Narrative; Freneau, To Sir Toby; Franklin, On the Slave Trade;
Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America, Letter to Samson Occom
Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown; Melville, Benito Cereno

.Gender; Models of femininity and masculinity:

Rowlandson, Narrative of the Captivity; Bradstreet, Poems; Melville, Benito Cereno, Billy
Budd, Sailor

.Aesthetic Views; Literary Nationalism:

Emerson, The American Scholar; Poe, The Philosophy of Composition; Melville, Hawthorne
and His Mosses

.American Gothic; the human capacity for evil:

Irving, The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow; Hawthorne, Tales; Poe, Tales