This lesson focuses on John Winthrop’s historic "Model of Christian Charity" sermon which is often referred to by its “City on a Hill “ metaphor. Through a close reading of this admittedly difficult text, students will learn how it illuminates the beliefs, goals, and programs of the Puritans. The sermon sought to inspire and to motivate the Puritans by pointing out the distance they had to travel between an ideal community and their real-world situation.
Malcolm X argued that America was too racist in its institutions and people to offer hope to blacks. In contrast with Malcolm X's black separatism, Martin Luther King, Jr. offered what he considered "the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest" as a means of building an integrated community of blacks and whites in America. This lesson will contrast the respective aims and means of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to evaluate the possibilities for black American progress in the 1960s.
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.
We are naturally curious about the lives (and deaths) of authors, especially those, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce, who have left us with so many intriguing mysteries. But does biographical knowledge add to our understanding of their works? And if so, how do we distinguish between the accurate detail and the rumor; between truth and exaggeration? In this lesson, students become literary sleuths, attempting to separate biographical reality from myth. They also become careful critics, taking a stand on whether extra-literary materials such as biographies and letters should influence the way readers understand a writer's texts.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wall-paper" was written during a time of change. This lesson plan, the first part of a two-part lesson, helps to set the historical, social, cultural, and economic context of Gilman's story.
Through Kate Chopin's classic novel "The Awakening," students will discover the cross sectional relationship between realism and regionalism. As students explore both the literary movements and the aspects of "common" life that Chopin liked to highlight, they will critically analyze specific passages from the text and the novel as a whole.
By studying other female characters in "The Awakening," students will see how Chopin carefully provides many examples of a socially acceptable "role" that Edna could adopt.
In the first chapter of William Faulkner's emotionally charged novel, "The Sound and the Fury," Benjy Compson, the son with intellectual disability who narrates this section, matters in a most profound sense. It is through his voice--childlike, detached, and often disorienting--that readers are confronted with the reality of time as a recurring motif and how time affects and informs human experiences.
One of Douglass's goals in his autobiography is to illustrate beyond doubt that slavery had an insidious, spirit-killing effect on the slaveholder as well as the slave.
What qualities made George Washington an effective military leader? How were the responsibilities of the Commander-in-Chief affected by conditions during the Revolutionary War?
