Sources of the Western Tradition Volume II: From the Renaissance to the Present

This two-volume reader features over 400 primary sources that emphasize the intellectual history and values of the Western tradition; more than 80 documents are new in the tenth edition.

Detailed introductions and review questions put each source in its historical context and provide reinforcement for students.

Sources are grouped around important themes in European history, including developments in intellectual and religious thought, warfare, revolution, and socio-economic change -- allowing students to compare and analyze multiple documents.

Volume I (covering ancient times until the Enlightenment) contains 33 new documents. New selections include Plato's famous Epistle VII (Ch. 3); Livy's description of Hannibal's character, Dio Cassius' defense of Julius Caesar (Ch. 4); and a bishop's sermon on girls who took a vow of virginity in order to become "brides of Christ" (Ch. 6).

Coverage of the Middle Ages in Volume I includes a passage by Rhazes, a renowned Muslim physician, on the dangers of alcoholism; and an account of the administration of justice on an English manor.

Chapter 8 has been reworked more than any other chapter, with new sections on "The Lure of Combat" and "Medieval Entertainment." It also now includes Emperor Frederick II's account of the need to hunt down and exterminate heretics, a document revealing the questioning spirit of Adelard of Bath, examples of vagabond student poetry and ethnic hostility that prevailed in universities, new samples of troubadour love songs, and Giovanni Boccaccio's famous description of the suffering caused by the Black Death.

Volume I's new sources on Early Modern Europe include Vasari's assessment of Michelangelo's genius and passages illustrating Shakespeare's insights into human nature (Ch. 9); excerpts from The Imitation of Christ and The Twelve Articles illustrating the grievances of the peasants (Ch. 10); and Friedrich Spee's account of the ordeal faced by a helpless woman indicted for witchcraft.

Volume I's Chapter 12 (which appears as Chapter 2 in Volume II), includes a new section on "Advocacy of Experimental Science," featuring William Harvey's account of his discovery of the circulation of the blood and chemist Herman Boerhaave's insistence that scientific truth requires the support of experimental evidence.

Volume I's Chapter 13 (which appears as Chapter 3 in Volume II) includes a new section, "Enlightenment Political Thought," with excerpts from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, discussing separation of powers, and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, advocating a republican form of government hereditary monarchy.

Volume II (covering the Renaissance until the present) contains 53 new selections. New sources on Modern Europe include Olympe de Gouges "Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen" (Ch. 4); Benjamin Constant's warning of the danger of unlimited popular sovereignty (Ch. 6); an excerpt from Charles Dickens' Hard Times (Ch. 7); and accounts of the Irish Potato Famine and a Russian woman doctor's description of the mistreatment of Russian women in factories (Ch. 8).

Volume II's Chapter 9 includes two new opposing views of British rule in India, one by Lord Lytton, the other by Jawaharlal Nehru; Joseph Conrad's compelling Heart of Darkness, which explores human depravity, is added to Chapter 10.

New documents in Volume II's coverage of "Western Civilization in Crisis" include accounts by British and German combatants at the Battle of the Somme, a description of Russian women in combat, and the ethnic cleansing of Turkey's Armenian minority (Ch. 11). New selections in Chapter 12 deal with the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany prior to World War II; there's also a passage from The Fate of Man in the Modern World (1935) by Nicholas Berdyaev.

Chapter 13 includes a virtually new section on Nazi ideology, several accounts by Jewish survivors depicting the cruel treatment of Jewish prisoners by SS guards, and graphic accounts by American veterans who describe the brutal campaign of Iwo Jima.

Chapter 14 includes George F. Kennan's article advising a policy of containment to deal with the Soviet threat in the early days of the Cold War, and two new sections ("Communist Oppression in Asia" and "The Twilight of Imperialism").

The concluding chapter includes new essays on ISIS, Islamic immigrants in Europe, and the European Union -- updated just prior to publication so as to be as current as possible. The other new selections are a description of the Taliban's war on women by a young Afghan woman who lived through it, and the testimonies of victims of human trafficking prepared by the U.S. Department of State.