our own anthology (our own canon) for students, since most classes cannot afford the time required to cover all of the early materials available in the anthology. We have a variety of options for selection in our mini-anthology. Working thematically, we can cover traditional Anglo-American issues, starting with Capt. John Smith, moving to the Puritans, and going into the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment by way of William Byrd. We can devise a syllabus around transnational issues by comparing Spanish writings with English writings with French writings at the outset, setting the stage for taking up the development of colonialism by discussing with students the Anglo-American colonial system, only one outcome of which was the American Revolution. We can survey the troubled relations between civil authority and religious authority in the writings of Spanish and English settlers as a precedent for the conflictedness in the discourse of nation-making and, later, abolition. We can treat women's studies, with the excellent selections by women writers afforded us. We can talk albeit to a lesser extent than with the other options about class systems, as represented by the wonderfully rich problem in hierarchy represented in the selections from the Virginia colony (Frethorne, Wingfield, and Smith), the Puritans (Bradford/Morton, Winthrop/Hutchinson), William Byrd, Sarah Kemble Knight, John Leacock.
             When I teach early American writings to undergraduates, I am teaching in a 200-level survey course of 25 students (maximum; there is a significant amount of writing expected), many of them sophomores but some of them juniors and seniors. The syllabus for the course is designed in such a way as to meet the university-mandated requirements for diversity enhancement in lower division courses. My own teaching style implements a cultural studies model, primarily because I feel most comfortable with the ways in which this model permits the examina...