This Launchpad guides students through Henry David Thoreau's classic political essay, "On Civil Disobedience."

This resource is intended to assist students in drawing interconnections between members of the small group of American literati that made up Thoreau’s circle based in Concord, Massachusetts, and who spawned the transcendentalist movement.

In this lesson students learn how Birth of a Nation reflected and influenced racial attitudes, and they analyze and evaluate the efforts of the NAACP to prohibit showing of the film.