Henry David Thoreau and Transcendentalism

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Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau ended up going to Harvard College and while he was there he studied Greek and Latin as well as German. During the time that he was studying he got ill and had to take a break from studying. In the year of 1837 he graduated from Harvard but after this he really did not know what he was going to do. Since he did not know what he wanted to do he ended up creating a school with his brother in 1838. Not long after John became ill and the school soon collapsed. After this occurred, Thoreau started working for his father. After college he became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson showed him Transcendentalism. Interesting enough Emerson became like a teacher to Thoreau and they started to live together. An amount of Thoreau’s work was published in The Dial which is a Transcendentalist Magazine.
In 1845, Thoreau built a small home which was on the land of Emerson and it was on Walden Pond. Thoreau changed the way that he was living life which gave him enough time to concentrate on his interests. Before he moved into his house he went on a boating trip which inspired him to start writing again. Soon enough he began to write about the life that he was living on Walden Pond. Interesting enough he realized that many people were interested in his life because it showed the readers the work of naturalists, environmentalists, and writers. Thoreau’s life was not all writing; he also encountered problems with the law. It all began when he did not pay a poll tax so he had to spend a day in jail.
After that occurred he wrote the essay known as “Civil Disobedience”, the reason for him doing this was because he did not agree with what the government was doing wh...

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...hich resulted in commotion. This made the newspaper headline and the outcome of that was that a march was created that roughly included 250,000 protesters to Washington, DC and this is where Martin Luther King delivered one of the most famous speeches, “I have a dream”. This speech talked about the fact that a there should not be a division of races. All King wanted was for everyone to be equal and discrimination to not exist. In result of most of his protests result in many people being threatened, arrested, beaten, and sometimes even worse. On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead by an assassin. King's death resulted in riots in many cities and 46 people were killed during this. In March 1969, James Earl Ray was found guilty of King's murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison. Many years after starting his sentence, Ray claimed that he was innocent.

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