Introduction to American Literature

America was founded by dreamers, and the American dream still resonates in our country today. Track the American dream from its Puritan beginnings to its optimistic descendants with a lesson that focuses on speeches by John F. Kennedy...

"A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority." The words of Henry David Thoreau on Civil Disobedience seem particularly relevant today, as are his writings and...

An insult to American politicians? A satire of news media? Or a critique of censorship, political corruption, and media propaganda? As part of a unit study on film, class members examine how director Frank Capra's develops these themes...

Need an extra challenge for your best readers? Check out a unit that uses Hannah Webster Foster’s epistolary novel, The Coquette, published in 1797, as the anchor text. The resource is packed with project ideas; each with its own...

As part of their exploration of the American dream, class members examine primary source materials to compare immigrant experiences of those arriving early in our country's history to those arriving in the US after World War II. To...

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...

Alexis de Tocqueville wanted to establish a successful democracy in France, so he turned to the newest example of democracy available in the early nineteenth century: the young American government. Learn more about the observations from...

Could geography really be the most logical explanation for the success rate of any given population? Jared Diamond makes his anthropological contention in his 1997 publication Guns, Germs, and Steel. A short explores his main points and...

If you've ever wondered why the majority of historical writers are male rather than female, Virginia Woolf may have an answer for you. A video analysis of A Room of One's Own details Woolf's argument about women's stifled role in the...

Claude Levi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology contends that distance and details separate world cultures—and not much else. High schoolers watch a short explanatory video to learn more about the theory of structuralism, the societial...