Humanities for American Literature

Read excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson's speech "American Scholar" to address and analyze passages from American literary works. Seniors will discuss three quotations from the text and read excerpts from the address. They then work in...

Bring multi-cultural experiences and literature into your language arts class with this lesson. Here, young readers explore the points of view of first and second-generation Asian immigrants with a list of various fiction and nonfiction...

One of the most famous short stories, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," is the focus of this resource. Learners read the story, respond to several text-based questions, and brainstorm ideas about a question relating to the text as...

How was Edgar Allan Poe able to create "intriguing, memorable, and lasting literature"? To answer this question, learners analyze the syntax, diction, and characterizations in Poe's poems and short stories and compare the impact of these...

Introduce your class to the writing of the indigenous Americans and, even more well known, their story telling. An engaging presentation describes what kinds of texts would be included in the oral stories performed and some common themes...

American dream or American nightmare? The Great Gatsby comes under scrutiny in a Crash Course on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story of the Jazz Age, its glitter and its ash heaps. The narrator’s focus in Part I of the two-part series, are...

Scary stuff! Whether approached as the first horror story or a "serious imaginative exploration of the human condition," Frankenstein continues to engage readers. Here's a packet of activities that uses Mary Shelley's gothic novel to...

I love Faulkner, his experimental style and stream of consciousness are so exciting. Your learners can analyze William Faulkner and his novel, The Sound and the Fury by defining his place in American literary history and exploring his...

Jonathan Edwards' "Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God" and Anne Bradstreet's "Upon the Burning of Our House" provide learners with an opportunity to develop their close reading skills. Groups identify the figurative language and appeals...

To conclude a three-part unit that examines how different writers express their views on the American Puritan tradition, class members compare the views of Ralph Waldo Emerson as expressed in his essay on "Self-Reliance" with those...