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In this lesson, students will learn that enslaved people resisted their captivity constantly. Because they were living under the domination of their masters, slaves knew that direct, outright,…
Lesson 3 guides students through Melville’s seamless integration of several literary genres—sermon, scientific writing, drama, and hymn—and moves into an analytical discussion of "Moby-Dick" as a…
Lesson 2 has students perform a close reading of one genre, dramatic script, in Chapter 37, to examine Melville’s characterizations of Ahab as a foil to Ishmael. Students then analyze the shifting…
Lesson 1 has students explore Melville’s development of his first person narrator Ishmael through a close reading of Chapter 1. Students will consider Ishmael’s positioning of the Fates in the…
Curriculum unit of three lessons explores Williams’s use of expressionism to more fully comprehend the theatrical devices and themes in The Glass Menagerie. In Lesson 1, students identify…
Curriculum unit of three lessons explores Williams’s use of expressionism to more fully comprehend the theatrical devices and themes in The Glass Menagerie. In Lesson 2, they analyze how…
Curriculum unit of three lessons explores Williams’s use of expressionism to more fully comprehend the theatrical devices and themes in The Glass Menagerie. In Lesson 3, they express…
Harriet Jacobs was the first woman to write a slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). She was born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, and died free in Washington, D…
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher. He is often called the “father of existentialism” for his exploration of anxiety and absurdity.
Students examine the divided nature of Raskolnikov’s character and personality. Then they uncover the divided natures of other characters—a fact that becomes increasingly evident as the novel…
Students examine the novel’s societal setting, which is also fraught with division. Crime and Punishment is more than just a demonstration of the idea that crime does not pay, it is a vivid…
Students examine the theory Man vs. Superman as it is revealed in several scenes within the novel and tackle the larger questions it bring up: Are humans really divided into two distinct…
It is perhaps no surprise that Fyodor Dostoevsky is known as one of the greatest psychological writers of all time, given his own dramatic history of suffering.
Thomas Day (1801–ca. 1861) was a successful free black furniture maker and businessman who stood “in the middle” of competing forces in nineteenth-century America: between black and white, slave…
Students survey works of art derived from many different eras and schools based on myths from The Metamorphoses. They compare the imagery in the artworks with the passages detailing Ovid’s…
Students compare the stories of creation as told by Ovid in Book I of The Metamorphoses with the Biblical narrative of creation as told in Genesis: 1–2. They identify the significance of…
Students compare two versions of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Ovid’s version in (Bk X: 1–85) tells the story primarily from an androcentric point of view through the character, Orpheus. In the…
In this lesson, part of a unit on Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, students focus on stave 5 as they identify and articulate themes that permeate the story.
In this lesson, part of a unit on Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," students examine Scrooge’s experiences with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future and discover how Dickens used…
In this lesson, part of a unit on Charles Dickens', "A Christmas Carol," students focus on the first stave of the novel as they identify the meanings of words and phrases that may be unfamiliar to…
In this triumph of magical realism, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" chronicles a century of the remarkable Buendía family’s history in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The three lessons…
In 1845, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and Written by Himself was published. In it, Douglass criticizes directly—often with withering irony—those who defend…
In this triumph of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles a century of the remarkable Buendía family’s history in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The three…
Grace Lin's novel Where the Mountain Meets the Moon combines the story of a courageous young girl who travels to search for help for her family with a set of Chinese traditional tales.…
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) was an American writer who hailed from South Berwick, Maine. Born into a well-established New England family, she enjoyed a comfortable childhood in the countryside,…
In this lesson, students analytically read “Learning to Read,” a poem by Francis Watkins Harper about an elderly former slave which conveys the value of literacy to Black people during and after…
The Preamble is the introduction to the United States Constitution, and it serves two central purposes. First, it states the source from which the Constitution derives its authority: the sovereign…
Long before the first shot was fired, the American Revolution began as a series of written complaints to colonial governors and representatives in England over the rights of the colonists.
This lesson provides students with tools to analyze primary source newspaper articles about the Great War (1914–1917) in order to understand public opinion regarding the U.S. entry into the war…
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