On Civil Disobedience

More urgent than ever: as we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience

Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature.

In “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), Henry David Thoreau recounts the story of a night he spent in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes,...