I'm fond of anthologies of readings meant for introductory courses in the social sciences. The studies themselves are usually much more nuanced than their summaries in text books, but you don't have to go digging them out of the journals they were originally published in. This one (I have the 13th edition) has certain problems, which you might want to be aware of before buying it.

First, the citations to the originals are not with the essays themselves. They are in a separate acknowledgement section at the front. So it's not easy to tell when what you're reading was published, nor whether it is an excerpt or the full article.

Also, the footnotes are not with original essay. All the footnotes for all the essays are collected in the back of the book. I suppose this saved room, but it makes pre-reading evaluation of an essay difficult.

Don't you think you'd want to teach students to look at the date and source of an article as well as the works cited before reading it????

On it's good side, it has a topical index to the essays, so if you're only interested in particular topics (like sociology of religion), you can focus in on those.

I'll be reading some of these essays, but this book will be out the door when I'm done. (Indeed I read less than I thought I would because the gender and religion articles are mostly 20 years or more out-of-date. Even some articles with contemporary copyright dates were clearly relying on sources that were much older.)

This book is not recommended unless you need it for class, and then it should be taken with a grain (or more) of salt. ( )

This volume is basically an anthology of essays on sociological topics, including the famous Nacirema paper. I have only thumbed through the volume but it looks very approachable and applicable to one without the background in specific theories.