Teacher Resources:
Sample Assignments Written by Richard and Kurt

Looking for help writing an assignment? The assignments posted here, written by Richard and Kurt, should help get you started!

To learn more about how we've organized organized the sample assignment home pages for each author, click here.

When you go to the sample assignment home page we've created for each author, you will find three different kinds of questions:

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading: these are brief questions we've written to help improve your students' understanding of the readings;

Questions for Writing: these are sample assignments that focus on a single reading;

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings: these are sample assignments that ask the students to make connections between two or more readings.

You will also find links from each author's sample assignment home page to additional examples of assignments for making connections between the readings. These are examples of the kind of extended assignments teachers of The New Humanities Reader have handed out in their classes. If you'd like to have your assignments considered for publication on this site, please send them on as an attachment (preferably in HTML) to Richard Miller (rem@newhum.com).

Abram, David. "The Ecology of Magic." The Spell of the Sensuous.

Ahmed, Leila. "On Becoming an Arab." A Border Passage: Cairo to America—A Woman's Journey.

Bacevich, Andrew. "The Real World War IV." Wilson Quarterly.

Boyarin, Jonathan. "Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul." Thinking in Jewish.

Caplan, Bryan. "'Market Fundamentalism' Versus the Religion of Democracy." The Myth of the Rational Voter.

Chua, Amy. "A World on the Edge." Wilson Quarterly.

Davis, Devra. "Presumed Innocent." The Secret History of the War on Cancer.

Dillard, Annie. "The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure." Harper's.

Faludi, Susan. "The Naked Citadel." The New Yorker.

Gilbert, Daniel. "Immune to Reality." Stumbling on Happiness.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime," The Tipping Point.

Greider, William. "Work Rules." The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy.

Jenkins, Henry. "Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars." Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Johnson, Steven. "The Myth of the Ant Queen." Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

Kenneally, Christine. "You Have Gestures." The First Word.

Krakauer, Jon. "The Alaska Interior" and "The Stampede Trail." Selections from Into the Wild.

Loffreda, Beth. "Selections from Losing Matt Shepherd: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder."

Luhrmann, Tanya. "Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity." American Anthropologist.

Nafisi, Azar. Excerpt from Reading Lolita in Tehran.

O'Brien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." The Things They Carried.

Postrel, Virginia. "Surface and Substance." The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness.

Rivoli, Pietra. "Dogs Snarling Together: How Politics Came to Rule the Global Apparel Trade." The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade.

Sacks, Oliver. "The Mind's Eye." The New Yorker.

Siebert, Charles. "An Elephant Crackup?" The New York Times Magazine.

Singer, Peter and Jim Mason. "Meat and Milk Factories." The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter.

Solnit, Rebecca. "The Solitary Stroller and the City." Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

Steingraber, Sandra. "War." Living Downstream.

Stock, Gregory. "The Enhanced and the Unenhanced." Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future.

Stout, Martha. "When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday." The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness.

Tannen, Deborah. "The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue." The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue.

Tenner, Edward. "Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead." Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.

Thurman, Robert. "Wisdom." Infinite Life.

Twenge, Jean. "An Army of One: Me." Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable than Ever Before.

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