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English 11

Unit 3

Voices of Freedom

6 topics · 24 practice questions · Free responseNot yet reviewed

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Notes

Abolition and the fight for rights

  • Frederick Douglass: his Narrative (1845) is a slave narrative that shows literacy as freedom. His 1852 Fourth of July speech uses irony and contrast to expose the nation's hypocrisy.
  • Sojourner Truth joined abolition and women's rights, using personal experience as evidence and direct rhetorical questions.

Lincoln

  • The Gettysburg Address (1863) is short and uses parallelism and a link to 1776. The Second Inaugural (1865) calls for reconciliation ("with malice toward none").

American poets

  • Whitman: free verse, catalogs, celebration of democracy and the individual; "O Captain! My Captain!" is an extended metaphor for Lincoln and the nation.
  • Dickinson: short, compressed poems with dashes, slant rhyme and personification, published mostly after her death.

Topics in this unit

Each topic has its own short notes and practice.

Practice

Which feature best describes a slave narrative?
A speaker praises a nation's ideals and then explains that those ideals are denied to many people. The main device being used is:
Which Lincoln phrase is an example of parallelism?
What is the main purpose of Truth's reference to her own labor in her speech?
Which excerpt most resembles Whitman's style?
A poem of four short lines uses dashes, unusual capital letters and the near rhyme "gain" and "men" to reflect on death. It most likely was written by:

Free response

Write your answer first, then open the scoring guide.

Free-response question

Read this original sentence: "We were told the lamp of liberty burned for every house in the nation, yet in my house the window stayed dark."

(a) Identify one figure of speech in the sentence and explain what it means.

Show the answer and scoring guide

The "lamp of liberty" and "window stayed dark" are metaphors. They mean that freedom was promised to everyone but denied to the speaker.

Check off the points you earned:

(b) Explain how this sentence is similar to Douglass's strategy in his Fourth of July speech.

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Like Douglass, the speaker contrasts the nation's stated ideals ("liberty for every house") with the reality of exclusion, which creates irony and exposes hypocrisy.

Check off the points you earned:

(c) Rewrite the idea as a sentence in Whitman's style, using free verse and a short catalog.

Show the answer and scoring guide

Example: "I see the weavers, the plowmen, the washerwomen and the drivers, each with a window, each waiting for the lamp." This uses a flowing line and a list of many kinds of people.

Check off the points you earned:

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