About the Book
Outside the Box is a reader that introduces students to significant ideas that have shaped our way of looking at the world and to the way those ideas were shaped through argumentation, skills writers learn to use in their own writing.
Each chapter illustrates the birth and development of an important idea through classic essays, then focuses on contemporary challenges to the concept from academics, experts, popular culture, and the general public. For example, Chapter Eight introduce the idea of the unconscious through essays from the founders of psychology, Freud and Jung, along with subsequent developments and critiques of their ideas by contemporary psychologists, then focuses on the current debate about how to treat depression. The final chapters explore how science and technology might shape our future, then turn to an examinations of how concepts in the book have been applied in popular culture, specifically Star Trek and The X-Files.
Outside the Box offers a wide variety of readings that serve as models for student writing, texts for analytical class discussion, and prompts for in-class or journal writings. Students become a part of the production of knowledge, not visitors to a museum of great ideas.
Table of Contents:
* Notes a new selection.
Preface.
Introduction.
How This Book is Organized.
How to Read an Essay.
How to Discuss an Essay.
The Idea of Paradigm Shifts
* Thomas S. Kuhn, excerpt from “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
* Stephen Jay Gould, “The Validation of Continental Drift.”
Chapter One. History: It Happened This Way, Right?
Gunnar Thompson, “New World Horizons.”
Jared Diamond, “Why Did History Unfold Differently on Different Continents for the Last 13,000 Years?”
Graham Hancock, “A Map of Hidden Places.”
Riane Eisler, “Introduction to The Chalice and the Blade.”
Marion Zimmer Bradley, excerpt from The Mists of Avalon.
Focus on the Origins of Contemporary Customs.
Jack Weatherford, “The Founding Indian Fathers.”
Diana Ferguson, “The Divine Child.”
Charles Panati, “Extraordinary Origins: Superstitions and Food.”
Chapter Two. Egypt, An Ancient Civilization: How Did Our Ancestors Live?
Mark Lehner, “The Pyramids of Egypt.”
Howard Carter, “The Finding of the Tomb.”
Barbara Lesko, “The Royal Women of Egypt.”
Focus on Alternative Theories.
Robert M. Schoch, “Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza.”
Christopher Dunn, “An Engineer in Egypt.”
Stephen S. Mehler, “Khemitology-New Paradigms.”
Focus on Cultural Origins.
Martin Bernal, “Black Athena.”
Mary Lefkowitz, “Not Out of Africa.”
Chapter Three. The Idea of Evolution: Who Were Our Ancestors?
Charles Darwin, “Struggle for Existence and Natural Selection.”
Stephen C. Stearns & Rolf F. Hoekstra, “The Punctuated Equilibrium Hypothesis.”
Thomas Huxley, “Man's War with Nature.”
Stephen Jay Gould, “Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?”
Focus on Debate.
Richard Milton, “Pandora's Box.”
Henry M. Morris, “Apes or Men?”
Sheila A. Womack, “Creationism vs. Evolutionism: The Problem for Cultural Relativity.”
Chapter Four. The Idea of Dominion: Our Relationship with Nature and Animals
Peter Singer, “Man's Dominion.”
Caroline Merchant, “Nature as Female.”
Ed McGaa “Attributes and Gifts of Winged Ones and Four-Leggeds.”
Gary Kowalski, “Art for Art's Sake: Why Do Animals Draw?”
Mark Twain, “The Lowest Animal.”
Focus on Animal Experimentation.
Tom Regan, “The Case for Strong Animal Rights.”
Mary Anne Warren, “Difficulties with the Strong Animal Rights Position.”
Henry Spira, “Fighting to Win.”
Donald J. Barnes, “A Matter of Change.”
Robert B. White, “Beastly Questions.”
Chapter Five. The Idea of Nurture vs. Nature: Gender and Family
Focus on Gender.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Woman's Situation and Character.”
Martin Seligman, “Sex.”
John Colapinto, “The True Story of John/Joan.”
Dianne Hales, “Is There a Female Brain?”
Susan McCarthy, “Must Dog Eat Dog?”
Focus on Family.
Margaret Mead, “Our Educational Problems in the Light of Samoan Contrasts.”
Stephanie Coontz, “Getting Past the Sound Bites: How History and Sociology Can Help Today's Families.”
Frank J. Sulloway, “Born to Rebel.”
Judith Rich Harris, “The Nurture Assumption on Trial.”
Chapter Six. The Idea of Justice: How Should We Change Society?
Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence.”
Henry David Thoreau, “On Civil Disobedience.”
Louise Fischer, “The Essential Gandhi: His Life, Work, and Ideas.”
Charles Dickens, excerpt from A Tale of Two Cities.
Ken Keyes, “The Hundredth Monkey.”
Focus on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
Malcolm X, “By Any Means Necessary.”
Chapter Seven. The Idea of Intelligence: My Brain's Better Than Your Brain
Howard Gardner, “Intelligence, Earlier Views.”
Stephen Jay Gould, “American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin.”
Howard Gardner, Mindy L. Kornhaber, & Warren K. Wake, “Recent Theories of Intelligence.”
Daniel Goleman, “When Smart is Dumb.”
Robert J. Sternberg, “Beyond IQ to Successful Intelligence.”
Focus on The Bell Curve.
Richard J. Herrnstein & Charles Murray, “Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ.”
Alan Davis, “The Bell Curve and Its Critical Progeny: A Review.”
Richard Nisbett, “Race, IQ, and Scientism.”
Henry A. Giroux & Susan Searls, “The Bell Curve Debate and the Crisis of Public Intellectuals.”
Chapter Eight. The Idea of the Unconscious: How is the Mind Structured?
Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id.”
Carl Jung, “Sigmund Freud.”
B.F. Skinner, “What is Man?”
Dennis Gersten, “Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?”
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, “The Assault on Truth.”
Focus on Treating Depression.
Connie Zweig, “Meeting the Shadow at Mid-life.”
Andrea Nelson, “Chaos Theory and Depression.”
Rick Foster & Greg Hicks, “How We Choose to Be Happy.”
Kathleen DesMaisons, “Potatoes, Not Prozac.”
Lou Marinoff & Colleen Kapklein, “Plato, Not Prozac.”
Chapter Nine. The Idea of Relativity: Western Physics, Eastern Metaphysics and the Search for a Unified Field Theory.
Gary Zukav, “Einstein Doesn't Like It, Part One.”
Samuel Glasstone, “Albert Einstein.”
Albert Einstein, “E = mc2.”
Michael Talbot, “The Cosmos as Hologram.”
Robert Gilmore, “Alice in Quantumland.”
Michio Kaku, “The Theory of the Universe?”
Focus on Western Physics and Eastern Philosophy.
Gary Zukav, “Einstein Doesn't Like It, Part Two.”
Fritjof Capra, “The Unity of All Things.”
Chapter Ten. Science and Technology: Where Are They Taking Us?
Focus on the Future.
John Maddox, “What Lies Ahead.”
John Horgan, “The End of Science.”
Michio Kaku, “Choreographers of Matter, Life, and Intelligence.”
John Naughton, “Radio Days.”
Ray Kurzweil, “Time Line.”
Focus on Ethics.
Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein.
Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen, “The Frankenstein Syndrome.”
Robert C. Goldbort, “'How Dare You Sport Thus with Life?' Frankensteinian Fictions as Case Studies in Scientific Ethics.”
Roger Shattuck, “The Bomb and The Genome.”
Gina Kolata, “A Clone Is Born.”
Chapter Eleven. The X-Files and Star Trek: Healing the Now, Creating the Future.
Focus on The X-Files.
Rhonda Wilcox and J. P. Williams, “`What Do You Think?’The X-Files, Liminality and Gender Pleasure.”
Mark Wildermuth, “The Edge of Chaos: Structural Conspiracy and Epistemology in The X-Files.”
Allison Graham, “`Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?’ Conspiracy Theory and The X-Files.”
Jan Delasara, “The X-Files and the Zeitgeist of the '90's.”
Focus on Star Trek.
Kathy E. Ferguson, Gilad Ashkenazi, and Wendy Schultz, “Gender Identity in Star Trek”
Rhonda Wilcox, “Dating Data: Miscegenation In Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
Lawrence M. Krauss, “DATA Ends the Game.”
Mark P. Lagon, “`We Owe It to Them to Interfere’: Star Trek and U.S. Statecraft In the 1960s and the 1990s.”
