COMMON CORE IN TRANSFORMATIVE TEXTS
Law, Literature and the History of Political Thought
"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with."
Martin Luther King, Jr., March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 28 August 1963.
Common Core
The Common Core in Transformative Texts is drawn and developed off of the Fall 2023 pilot seminar in American Institutions & Ideals (HST 3340) offered under the title The Faces of Freedom. Now a foundational seminar of The Democracy Institute-Teagle Foundation joint initiative, The Faces of Freedom will run for 15 weeks (meeting twice a week) every semester for the next 5 years, using this Common Core as the foundation for the shared, common syllabus.
The Core’s lower division seminar places heavy emphasis on primary texts; the upper division seminar opens room for close engagement with major primary texts and contemporary interventions in American letters and political thought. The upper-division version of The Faces of Freedom launched in Fall 2024 with 8 sections offered by Core faculty, followed by the potential introduction of the lower-division seminar in Fall 2025. The seminar is the cornerstone of The Democracy Institute’s GIFT | Global Inquiries in Freedom & Tyranny Project, serving as the gateway course to both our Minor in Law & Nonviolence Studies and the upcoming Major in Global Justice administered by The Democracy Institute.
All faculty teach their sections of The Faces of Freedom on the common syllabus, with “required readings” drawn from The Common Core arranged in a common sequence. The seminar thus unfolds in the same thematic sequence across all 8 sections laid out in the common syllabus.
We believe “faculty self-knowledge” is key to making the Common Core rewarding and sustainable. With that in view, we have kept the Core’s pool of transformative texts deliberately expansive so that Core Faculty from other fields can familiarize themselves with the framework within which the seminar is crafted and the arc along which it will be taught. A larger pool of texts helps us touch those points of relative familiarity that instructors might individually have with some texts over others while we build the Common Core syllabus.
The common syllabus was collaboratively crafted in May 2024, with the Core Faculty convening for the Democratic Visions Summer Institute in June for a six-week workshop. The inventory of materials below that constitute the Common Core in Transformative Texts is a meta-set of readings. “Required readings” will be drawn from here, taught in all sections in a common modular sequence with some latitude for the Core Faculty to bring in their own expertise and materials. This inventory primarily provides us, in addition to an archive of materials, a philosophical and chronological arc for curating sustained conversations on American Institutions & Ideals—its past and future— and one that will animate The GIFT Project at large.
Breadth
In addition to drawing from it our materials for the common syllabus of The American Institutions Common Core, we intend to use individual modules of The Common Core in Transformative Texts as a building block for all newly created, faculty-led seminars that will serve the degree pathway in Global Justice at CPP. These additional seminars, newly created to serve The Democracy Institute’s Majors program, will have their own unique course numbers; units earned through them will move students forward towards the degree. The Faces of Freedom will continue to serve for all students as the gateway course to Global Justice. There are two required Capstone Seminars for the Pathway: Law, Violence & Nonviolence (CLS 4490) and The Faces of Injustice (currently moving through the approval process).
The inclusion of specially tailored faculty-led seminars aligned with The American Institutions Common Core is designed to recruit an interdisciplinary roster of faculty to eventually teach in the Core (HST 3340 and HST 2202) seminar itself. These faculty will become GIFT Faculty Fellows at The Democracy Institute for their first year. While we continue to consolidate and grow this pathway through the Common Core seminar, faculty-led seminars with new numbers steadily work their way up through the system and become part of the degree pathway in Global Justice. We anticipate these seminars to be particularly helpful for students who want to return to seminar-style instruction and to humanistic learning more broadly, especially if they have already met the AI Requirement and therefore must take a new seminar (with a different course number).
Over the coming three years, we believe The Teagle Foundation’s support for Democratic Visions will help our gateway seminar on freedom become the face of the American Institutions (AI) requirement at CPP and beyond. Our expansion and consolidation will boost—and in turn be boosted by—the roster of specifically designed seminars in Global Justice that we expect will help create the foundation for a shared experience in liberal education.
This also brings us to the heart of our story about sustainability, as students together unpack the history and future of American ideals studied through its defining social and rhetorical moments. And they might continue to return to this story by taking our other seminars, with the potential of delivering the most dynamic outcome for collaboration between The Teagle Foundation Cornerstone program and The GIFT Project.
The Common Core in Transformative Texts provides us with a bedrock of shared ideas and ideals from which to forge a common college experience in global humanities. Above all, it gives us a modular pathway for initiating a systemwide conversation on how to reshape and regenerate liberal education across CSU—and the country—using the exemplary power that the American Institutions (AI) requirement gives the California Higher Ed system. The Liberal Strategies Leadership Initiative, for which The Teagle Foundation’s additional support is going to prove decisive, kickstarts our statewide movement for this kind of globally oriented civic education and citizenship.
STRUCTURE
Below, we lay out the organizing principle and modular structure of The Common Core in Transformative Texts in five connected blocks of materials in American letters. Each block represents a thematic module, spread over roughly 3 weeks in the seminar, over the 15-week long semester. The modules—and their titles—represent the conceptual anchors and chronological flow of the seminar, with each block excavating a specific dimension of the modern democratic and constitutional experiment and of America’s singular, if troubled, place in it.
Rather than proceeding in chronological fashion, the modules and their core themes unfold philosophically along the broad arc of the American universe, taking students on a journey with texts that have sought to bend the country’s moral universe towards justice (and sometimes, over the last two centuries, violently cleaved away from it). Our foundational question is broad, designed to liberate the constraints on student imagination and let them ask the big question of our time: Is America exemplary of—or is it an exception to—the global democratic story whose mythological, sacrificial attachment to freedom—even at the price of unbearable inequality—it has in such large measure helped script? How do we respond today to the challenge, as Judith Shklar posed, of “redeeming American political thought?”
INTRODUCTION
THE AMERICAN CONDITION
This module establishes the key and overarching theme of The American Ideals Core: the ongoing struggle to fulfill the founding American promise of an egalitarian and democratic society, despite its flawed understandings and often ambivalent commitments to human freedom. In this introductory module, students will be encouraged to examine what Barbara Jordan called the struggle to enlarge the circle of “we, the people” and probe why this enlargement remains a source of an archaic, 18th-century fear embedded in American political and moral consciousness. Perhaps most importantly: How do some of the most vital thinkers of our own constellation reveal this fear to be the running motif of the American condition?
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son in Collected Essays (1949; New York: Library of America, 1998).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
John Okada, No-No Boy (1957; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).
Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1969).
Carlos Bulosan, American Is in the Heart (1943; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).
Judith Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought: Posthumous Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Michael Joseph, 1963).
Frederick Douglass, “Lessons of the Hour” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987).
FOUNDATIONS
THE LETTER OF THE LAW
How could a colonial society whose most radical spokesmen—like Thomas Paine—believed that human freedom was a matter not of God’s will but a function of “common sense” create a system of laws so steeped in the sovereign right of some men to own others as slaves? This module engages the foundational writings of America’s constitutional heritage that shaped and reshaped its judicial and constitutional order, highlighting the bond between law, political violence, and the contested meanings of the nation’s democratic identity. Texts in this module are dedicated specifically to help students closely study the art of humanistic and humane interpretation—in particular, the tortured relationship between the “letter” and “spirit” of the law—that has formed and deformed the core of American jurisprudence and its constitutional guardrails.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963).
Frederick Douglass, Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass, One on West India Emancipation…and the Other on the Dred Scott Decision (Rochester, NY: C. P. Dewey, 1857).
Judith Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First”, Daedalus 111: 3, Summer 1982.
Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America,” The Arena 23,
January 1900.
Hannah Arendt, “Truth
and Politics” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1969).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fugitive Slave Law” and “Fortune of the Republic” in Emerson’s Anti-Slavery Writings, ed. Gougeon Len and Myerson Joel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Sonia Sotomayor, “Dissenting Opinion” in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. Harvard & UNC (Supreme Court of the United States,
29 June 2023).
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1985).
Alexander Hamilton et al, The Federalist Papers (1787-88; New York: Coventry, 2015).
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, and Two Essays on America (1835-40; New York: Penguin, 2003).
OF AMERICAN PASSIONS AND ITS RHETORICAL INHERITANCE
THE MORAL ARC
This module assembles a new archive of formative moments in American oratory, introducing students to the relationship between public speech and abolitionist justice over 3 weeks of intensive engagement with texts that we might call—following Hannah Arendt—the “lost treasure” of American rhetoric. This newly assembled archive helps students explore the complex role of American ideals in shaping the modern argument around language, prejudice, and passion. Studying further the relationship between secrecy and government—arcana imperii—that we outline in the preceding module, we explore the role of technology in shaping political rhetoric and the increasingly fragile line between truth and lying that runs through the long history of American institutions. Is this why figures like W.E.B. Du Bois sometimes resort to the lyrical intensity of poetry—and the play of metaphor—to chronicle both the spiritual strivings for freedom in America and the disappearance from the world of its very language?
James Baldwin, “Black English: A Dishonest Argument” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage, 2010).
W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Essays from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1920).
Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1981; New York: Penguin, 2020).
Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020).
Octavia Butler, “The Monophobic Response” in Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the Black Diaspora, ed. Sheree R. Thomas (New York: Warner Books, 1995).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord on the ‘Fugitive Slave Law’” in Emerson’s Anti-Slavery Writings, ed. Gougeon Len and Myerson Joel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
John F. Kennedy, “What can you do for your Country?” The 1961 Presidential Inaugural Address, Milestone Documents: National Archives.
Terisa Siagatonu, “Atlas” [Poetry Foundation].
Frederick Douglass, “Sources of Danger to the Republic” (1867) and “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852) in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream,” March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 28 August 1963.
Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address” in The Gettysburg Address: Perspectives on Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, ed. Sean Conant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Tracy K. Smith, “Declaration” [Poetry Foundation].
THE LIBERALISM OF OUR FEARS
This module explores the rise of illiberal challenges to the democratic experiment in America, focusing on the contradictions in modern liberalism at large as they were heightened by post-Cold War challenges to the liberal global order. The question to be pursued in this module is not only about America’s role in shaping that fragile post-war liberal consensus; it is also to closely unpack how America’s fears were—and continue to be—aggravated by its defining role in fashioning the worldwide constitutional experiment: a fear whose populist, anti-globalist rage continues to deform the American democratic project. In sum, this module begins to tie together three major conceptual threads of the seminar: law, judgment, and truth, especially as they together illuminate the profound temptation to violence in American—and Euro-American—life.
Hannah Arendt “The Perplexities of Rights of Man” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, Part I: Stateless Persons (1948; New York: Penguin, 2000).
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1935).
Judith Shklar, “Conscience and Liberty” in Political Obligation, ed. Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Hannah Arendt, “On Violence” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1969).
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952).
Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Hannah Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003).
Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
GOVERNMENTS AND VIRTUES:
CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE SHADOW
OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Few intellectual movements in modern political thought have transcended the murky complexities of the social question—the sickness of modern capitalism—as heroically as American transcendentalism. And yet, from the reservoirs of this heritage, also emerges the most galvanizing political idea of the last century: civil disobedience. In this module, students work through the sometimes militant, sometimes conservative thrusts of American pragmatism and the pragmatic approach to political action. In the process, they probe the two extremes of American moral and political commitment: a sacrificial commitment to nonviolent action from which the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s were forged, on the one hand, and an equally resilient nexus of law and political violence that has defined the American condition since its founding, on the other.
B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, with a Reply by Mahatma Gandhi & Castes in India: Its Genesis, Mechanism, and Development
(Jullundur: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1936).
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Self-Rule (1909; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1969).
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” (1958) and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) in The Radical King, ed. Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Lecture on Slavery” in Emerson’s Anti-Slavery Writings, ed. Gougeon Len and Myerson Joel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Henry David Thoreau,
“On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." Originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), The Project Gutenberg.
SECONDARY TEXTS
GIVING ACCOUNT
AMERICAN FREEDOM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
This module of Secondary Texts is aimed at developing a set of shared intellectual commitments and conceptual vocabulary for Core Faculty and students. Faculty will use these secondary materials throughout the sections, with the purpose of cultivating in students a broader, interpretive awareness of why humanistic learning—the commitment to reading and interpretation—remains fundamental to reimagining and regenerating our social and civic contract. The texts and authors chosen here also exemplify the ways in which to develop this interpretive skill, which is one of the key outcomes we strive to accomplish. They help students deepen their understanding of the civic skills that an act of judgment (and dissent) requires when one lives in a democracy. This is why we dedicate a module to rhetoric, letting students closely study how language—free speech—came to be a weapon in America.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(New York: New Press, 2010).
Danielle Allen, Justice by Means of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
(New York: One World, 2017).
Jefferson Cowie, White Freedom: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
(New York: Basic, 2022).
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for our Own
(New York: Crown, 2021).
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021).
Thomas Holt, The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Charles Mills, Black Rights, White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
(New York: Knopf, 2019).
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014).
Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021).
Richard Rothstein, The Color of the Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017).
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Michael Waldman, Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023).
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020).