Civil Disobedience: Breaking the Law from Socrates to the Civil Rights Movement

This seminar uses canonical texts, alongside little known primary sources and works of historical analysis to examine the origins of Civil Disobedience theory and practice. We will discuss Civil Disobedience in the context of U.S. fugitive slave law, labor organizers occupying factories, the temperance protesters who went to jail by smashing barrels of rum, the pioneering use of mass civil disobedience by Gandhi, and, of course, the American Civil Rights Movement.