Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

Prolegomenon to a Tradition: What is American Philosophy? 5
Leonard Harris

Part I Origin and Teleology 7

1 Letter to the Taino/Arawak Indians, 1493 9
King Ferdinand of Aragon

2 Speeches 11
Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha

3 How the World Began 15
Arthur C. Parker

4 The Interesting Narrative 22
Olaudah Equiano

5 A History of New York 32
Washington Irving

6 Nature 43
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Part II Minds and Selves 63

7 Impressions of an Indian Childhood 65
Zit Kala Sa

8 Of Being and Original Sin 73
Jonathan Edwards

9 Principles of Psychology 88
William James

10 Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness and Nature 108
Josiah Royce

11 Our Brains and What Ails Them 122
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

12 Race 134
W. E. B. Du Bois

13 The Genesis of the Self and Social Control 150
George Herbert Mead

Part III Knowledge and Inquiry 163

14 Knowledge 165
Frances Wright

15 An Introduction to the Study of Phylosophy Wrote in America for the Use of a Young Gentleman 176
Cadwallader Colden

16 What Pragmatism Is 188
Charles Sanders Peirce

17 The Supremacy of Method 198
John Dewey

18 The Practice of Philosophy 211
Susanne K. Langer

19 An American Urphilosophie 223
Robert Bunge

Part IV Community and Power 237

20 Traditional History of the Confederacy of the Six Nations 239
Committee of the Chiefs

21 Account of My Life 262
Benjamin Franklin

22 The Federalist Papers 270
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

23 Observations on the New Constitution 278
Mercy Otis Warren

Part V Slavery and Freedom 287

24 The Pueblo Revolt, 1680 289
Don Antonio de Otermin

25 Fourth of July Address at Reidsville, New York, 1854 295
John Wannuaucon Quinney

26 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 1829 298
David Walker

27 Prejudices Against People of Color, and Our Duties in Relation to this Subject 313
Lydia Maria Francis Child

28 Civil Disobedience 325
Henry David Thoreau

29 Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, July 5, 1852 337
Frederick Douglass

30 Woman versus the Indian 347
Anna J. Cooper

Part VI Democracy and Utopia 359

31 Male Continence 361
John Humphrey Noyes

32 Democratic Vistas 374
Walt Whitman

33 Newer Ideals of Peace 389
Jane Addams

34 Anarchism: What It Really Stands For 405
Emma Goldman

35 What to Do and How to Do It 412
George Washington Woodbey

36 What the Indian Means to America 420
Luther Standing Bear

37 Our Democracy and the American Indian 423
Laura M. C. Kellogg

38 Cultural Pluralism 433
Alain L. Locke

Index 446

"Leonard Harris, Scott L. Pratt, and Anne S. Waters have produced
an anthology nurtured by a profound epistemological and cultural
value pluralism. The text unapologetically reveals a diversity of
philosophical perspectives and traditions previously marginalized
by intellectual and political normative forces that have valorized
a few white men as the 'oracle voices' of American
philosophy. This new, relevant, and highly engaging anthology will
force academic and cultural gatekeepers to radically reassess what
it means 'to know and to be,' 'to do American
philosophy,' 'to be an American,' and
'to live democratically." George Yancy, Duquesne University
and editor of Cornel West: A Critical Reader (Blackwell
2001)

Leonard Harris is Professor of Philosophy Professor at Purdue University. of Philosophy, He is editor of Racism (1999), The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke, (1999) and co-editor of Exploitation and Exclusion: Race and Class in Contemporary US Society (1992).

Scott Pratt is Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. He is co-editor of The Philosophy of Cadwallader Colden (forthcoming).

Anne Waters is Assistant Professor at Texas Woman's University. She is the editor of American Indian Thought: A Philosophical Reader (Blackwell, forthcoming). She is also co-editor of Hypatia, Journal of Feminist Philosophy and is on the editorial board of Ayaanwayaamizin: An International Indigenist Philosophy Journal, and the Radical Philosophy Review.

L. Harris, Purdue University; A. S. Waters, State University of New York at Binghamton