See the Moby-Dick film.

Great Books, Discovery channel (Moby Dick)

1.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0kjVPP8vRM

2.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgdhPL9Jk94

3.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbLjBOtWlYs

4.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeWqTfTb9f0

Midterm explanation

1.      American Renaissance: In American literature, the American Renaissance was a period during which many of the literary works most widely considered American masterpieces were produced. The period is generally defined as the mid-19th century but especially the years roughly from 1850 to 1855. Major works from those years include Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

2.      Transcendentalism : Transcendentalism is a religious and philosophical movement that developed during the late 1820s and '30s[1] in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest against the general state of spirituality.

3.      American Dream: The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.

4.      Manifest Destiny: In the 19th century, Manifest Destiny was the widely held belief in the United States that American settlers were destined to expand throughout the continent. Historians have for the most part agreed that there are three basic themes to Manifest Destiny includes the special virtues of the American people and their institutions, America's mission to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America, and an irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty.

5.      “Inferiority Complex” (in American Literature, p. 167) : Inferiority Complex means that only a very youthful colonial nation, unsure in its youth, could have been so aggressively self-assertive, so proud of its lack of culture, so vocally confident in its future, and so fearful of European “evils”, particularly what was thought to be European “effeminacy.”

Henry David Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Walden: Walden, by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self-reliance. Four years before Thoreau embarked on his Walden project, his great teacher and role model Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an enormously influential essay entitled “Self-Reliance.” It can be seen as a statement of the philosophical ideals that Thoreau’s experiment is meant to put into practice. Certainly self-reliance is economic and social in Walden Pond: it is the principle that in matters of financial and interpersonal relations, independence is more valuable than neediness.