For Freshman Composition, honors and advanced composition, history of ideas courses, Humanities, and for courses that emphasize writing across the disciplines. Past to Present encapsulates for students essential readings from the fields of humanities, social science, and science of the great ideas that have changed our world. It is divided into seven thematic parts that trace the history of important ideas from their roots to their current incarnations. Each of the 74 readings includes discussions that focus on the history of the idea, the writer's rhetorical strategies, and the context in which the piece was written.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. I. THE INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE: PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC VOICES. Gayatri Devi, A Princess Remembers. Anne Frank, from The Diary of Anne Frank. Joan of Arc, I Have Nothing More to Say. Paul Monette, Becoming a Man. Lord Chesterfield, Letter to His Son. Stendhal, The Crystallization of Love John Keats, Letters to Fanny Brawne. Joseph Addison, Reflections in Westminster Abbey. George Bernard Shaw, She Would Have Enjoyed It. II. THE COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE: THE HUMAN CONDITION. Thomas Robert Malthus, The Principle of Population. Diane Ackerman, The Social Sense. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Kenneth M. Stampp, To Make Them Stand in Fear. Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write. James Baldwin, Letter to My Nephew. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind. George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant. Margaret Sanger, The Turbid Ebb and Flow of Misery. Simone de Beauvoir, The Married Woman. Marilyn Yalom, The Wife Today. III. THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION: THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PAST. R. G. Collingwood, What Is History? Herodotus, Concerning Egypt. Howard Carter, Finding the Tomb. Arnold J. Toynbee, Challenge and Response. Elaine Pagels, The Social History of Satan. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship. Walt Whitman, Death of Abraham Lincoln. Maurizio Chierici, The Man from Hiroshima. John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address 1961. Oscar Handlin, Steerage. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile. IV. THE NATURAL WORLD: INSTINCT AND SURVIVAL. Arthur D. Hasler and James A. Larsen, The Homing Salmon. Charles Darwin, from The Origin of Species. Konrad Lorenz, The Dove and the Wolf. Jean Henri Fabre, The Praying Mantis. Mark Twain, The Lowest Animal. Hans Ruesch, Slaughter of the Innocent. Constance Holden, Identical Twins Reared Apart. Matt Ridley, Genome. Gina Kolata, A Clone Is Born. V. THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE: KNOWLEDGE OF ANIMATE AND INANIMATE WORLDS. Sir Leonard Woolley, The Flood. Dave Sobel, The Prize. Nathaniel Philbrick, The Attack. Thor Heyerdahl, How to Kill an Ocean. Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth. Blaise Pascal, The Two Infinites. Fred Hoyle, The Continuous Creation of the Universe. Charles H. Townes, Harnessing Light. Christopher Evans, The Revolution Begins. Neil Postman, Information. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead. VI. THE MIND AND THE SPIRIT: UNDERSTANDING THE UNKNOWN. G.E. Moore, The Indefinability of Good. Plato, The Allegory of the Cave. Sigmund Freud, Typical Dreams. Marcel Proust, The Bodily Memory. Readings from the Scriptures in Hinduism: Rig-Veda, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-Gita. Three Texts from The Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Burning Bush, and The Ten Commandments. The Prophet Muhammad The Koran. St. Matthew, Parables in The New Testament. The Enlightenment of the Buddha, Buddhacarita. Alan W. Watts, Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. Clarence Darrow, The Myth of Immortality. Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism. VII. THE ARTS OF CIVILIZATION: THE HUMAN ELEMENT. Aristotle, Poetics. Giorgio Vasari, The Life of Leonardo da Vinci. David Sylvester, The Genius of Michelangelo: An Interview with Henry Moore. John Ruskin, The Stones of St. Mark's. P. D. Ouspensky, The Taj Mahal. Paul Roberts, Something About English. Gustav Flaubert, Letters to Louise Colete. Edward Rothstein, Why We Live in the Musical Past. Sergei Eisenstein, The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram. Agnes de Mille, Pavlova. John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Appendix: Writing About Great Ideas. A Sample Comparative Essay. Credits. Index of Authors and Titles.