Essays on Henry David Thoreau

Introduction

Are humans threatening the survival of our planet by disrupting the ecosystem? Marvin Gaye and the public believed this to be the case in the 1960’s and 1970’s when the modern Green Movement first began. Gaye sang “Poison is in the wind that blows from the north and south and east. Radiation underground and in the sky, animals and birds live near by all die. What about this crowded land, how much more abuse from man can we stand?” . Greenhouse effect, ozone layer depletion, ocean poisoning, topsoil depletion, food chain poisoning, acid rain, pollution along with demands ...

Henry David Thoreau and Dr. Martin Luther King are two people who helped to change America for the better with their actions and their words. Henry David Thoreau, in both is writing and in his social practice, developed a new form for citizenship and civic action called Civil Disobedience. He developed Civil Disobedience in response to his government’s support of slavery, but also its support for the Mexican-American War. Over the years, many great leaders of important social movements, both within and without America, have been inspired by the example of the life and social practice Henry David ...

"Walden or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau belongs to the vivid and memorable American works of classical literature. The personality of the author and the pages of his famous book highlight anti-capitalist, romantic, and utopian ideas that received considerable spread in the United States in the 30-40-ies of the last century and these ideas were a kind of protest against the brutality of the bourgeois industrial progress and its accompanying social ills.   The ideological pioneers of the anti-capitalist and romantic-utopian protests were called transcendentalists. It is a circle of prominent representatives of the American democratic intelligentsia, ...

Introduction

Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau, and Malcolm X assisted in shaping the current American society that is made of the blacks and whites. For Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, they seemed to be preaching two opposing sides of politics of the blacks. Martin called upon nonviolent ways of resisting the white domination while Malcolm insisted on any available means that were necessary for bringing the liberation to the black community. As a result, Malcolm has always been misrepresented as ‘black Klu Klux Klan’ that was a group which consisted of racial extremists. Henry David Thoreau, on ...

In the early 1800s, Neoclassical writing was par for the course; works were typically very restrained, conservative, and focused on structure more than anything else. However, as the 19th century rolled along, more and more authors (including Washington Irving and

James Fenimore Cooper) found themselves writing stories of passion, full of experimentation and discovery. In these works, notions of established language and literary structure were challenged, as the Romantics ceased believing in the established systems of literature and created wholly new works that were free from restraint. While the works of Smith demonstrate the observational, dry and formal writing ...

Summary and Annotation of Literature: Thoreau’s Synthesizing Metaphor

“Thoreau’s Synthesizing Metaphor,” the author James A. Hamby explains the interpretation of metaphor that used in Henry David Thoreau literatures. Through out his works, Thoreau never halted to emphasize on the importance and the essence of life in connecting human beings to our nature, which is referred as “man-and-the-land relationships”. In one of his literature Walden, he united two antithetic terms “natural” and “pertinent” in demonstrating that his life is logical, reasonable yet natural and free, which the author thinks the way of adopting these two words showed Thoreau’s sweeping scope of concerns. In the chapter “Economy”, ...

Henry David Thoreau is the founding father of American Liberation Thought. He is among the most influential and beloved writers of the 19th century. His writings have influenced and inspired millions of people across the world for over 150 years. It is for this reason and many others that he should be studied in high school. This paper will determine profound reasons why Thoreau should be taught in high school. - Sources (Gruenewald 14) according to Gruenewald, Thoreau made great contribution with his encapsulate environment stewardship. He was always awake to his surroundings, he saw things in ...

The American thinker, philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau devoted all his short life (1817-1862) to еру search for the truth, moral purity and simplicity of the human relationships, harmony of the world of people and the nature. Henry Thoreau became one of the most eloquent propagandists of the idea of the civil disobedience (Cain, 2000). Once, when he came to the city for one day in a shoe shop, Thoreau was caught by the police because he did not pay the poll tax. Faced with a choice to go to jail or pay, a hermit chose the first variant, thus, protesting ...

Introduction

People are indeed not created equal. They all have different faces, personalities, abilities, beliefs, principles, and cultures among others. With that being said, Henry David Thoreau’s literary piece The Battle of the Ants, found at the twelfth chapter of Walden, is a great example of this actuality. The story tells of how a simple story of war or battle between two species of ants, which are different in size and color, can serve as a reflection of the main implication of humanitarian conflicts in today’s reality. Thoreau used black and red ants as an allegory to depict the inequality between ...

Introduction

Henry David Thoreau was an American philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, author, and poet. He is famous for his book Walden, which is a reflection on simple living in the lap of nature, and his essay “Resistance to Civil Government”, also known as “Civil Disobedience”. First published in 1849, Resistance to Civil Government mostly covered the rights of an individual in relation to the government (Wendy 2006). Unlike the dictionary definition of ‘civil’, which means observing the accepted social forms, Henry Thoreau used the word ‘civil’ to mean interrelations between citizens, and citizens’ interrelation with the state. David Henry Thoreau wrote the ...

Implicit in any writer’s work are the ideologies of the culture under which the writer was raised. American culture has values, which place emphasis on the individual. In an essay like Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” the self-sufficiency is the topic explored. In other essays, like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Changes: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” this individual autonomy from groups is an assumption that Gladwell assumes the audience would share with him when he analyzes the impact of social media on identity and it’s limitations in driving individuals to action. William F. Buckley ...

The essay “Resistance to Civil Government” was penned by Henry David Thoreau in 1849, in which he wrote of a new and radical idea that suggested that the moral compass of man should be able to question law, rather than the other way around. He believed that even if people cannot take part in preventing injustice, they should at least not take part in causing injustice. According to him, while it would be moral to even be imprisoned if it helps prevent injustice, but that it was not mandatory for people to do so. Thoreau believed that all that can ...

Human Dignity and Conscience in the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Maya Angelou

At first glance, it seems like a very difficult task to find any real connection between the writings of Maya Angelou on the one hand and Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson on the other. After all, Emerson and Thoreau were Northern white men of the 19th Century who had never personally experienced the oppression of slavery of the type of segregation and inequality that Angelou grew up with in Stamps, Arkansas in the 1940s. Even though they both opposed slavery, and Thoreau was willing to defy the law and go to jail to uphold his principles, in the ...

The “New Negro Movement” came about as a result of a need to establish new identity for African-Americans after their freedom in the Civil War. There was still a great deal of racism present throughout the country, even in the comparatively enlightened cities of New York and Chicago, among others. The primary battlefield of this cultural movement was Harlem, New York, considered the “cultural capital of black America.” A great number of blacks had moved to New York in order to become part of this burgeoning musical and art culture, as well as financial and job opportunities. This soon-to-be “mecca for black ...

This essay explores the differences in the views of Henry David Thoreau and Benjamin Franklin with regard to individual or personal freedoms. The views expressed here are derived principally from the specified readings provided in the Coursepack: 1. Henry David Thoreau: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience 2. Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography (selections) These two men had very different ways of expressing their views and beliefs. I intend to describe their separate approaches to freedom, beginning with Thoreau, then finally to highlight the clear differences between the outlooks and philosophies of Thoreau and Franklin. In ...

Introduction

In the American History of 1706- 1790, Benjamin Franklin is an honored figure due to his influence of development of United States of America and how the country would understand itself. Benjamin Franklin is the only famous person who is known and recognized for signing all the key documents of creating the United States of America. These documents include the constitution of United States, Declaration of Independence, Treaty of Alliance with France and Treaty of Paris. The major influence of Benjamin Franklin in these documents is well understood and recognized due to his concept development on America and how ...

American Transcendentalist Literature

The Transcendentalist movement consisted of a group of people that were skeptical of the status quo in religion, science and politics. They studied philosophy and wrote great literature. In fact they even influenced the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Ralph Waldo Emerson is the American who is most often thought of when transcendentalism is mentioned. During the height of the popularity of the movement he was at the center. On December 9, 1841 Emerson gave a speech titled “Transcendentalism” at Boston’s Masonic Temple. In it he strongly stood up for less rigid attitudes towards nature for example he ...

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thorea was surely one of the finest writers to emanate from the United States before the Civil War. His novel Walden describes an almost perfect settlement where the subject lives simply in natural surroundings and is an ideal introduction to his seminal work. Another important work is his essay on Civil Disobedience which is perhaps one of the best known elements which argues for resistance to civil government which is a moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau’s books and articles number over 20 volumes and he has several contributions on natural history and philosophy where ...

Transcendentalism is a philosophy that espoused the strength and value of the individual, grounding thoughts and religion around the idea of individual power and idealism (Koster, 1975). According to transcendentalism, reality is centered around the idea of the self; man relies on itself in order to continue existing and thriving, and there is a kind of spirituality that comes from being able to sustain oneself and succeed on their own. Henry David Thoreau, in his works Walden and “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” showcases his transcendentalist ideas in a number of ways. In his novel Walden, Thoreau details the two ...