美国史小论文

上海师范大学标准试卷

2010 ~ 2011 学年第一学期考试日期2010 年12 月27 日

科目：美国史话（小论文）（A卷）

英语专业本科08 年级班姓名学号

试题内容：写一篇关于美国历史事件或人物的论文。选题自由，可以写关于美国历史中的各个方面，如文化、语言、社会、政治、经济等。

字数：1000字左右

字号：小4号

APA格式，单倍行距；大小标题与正文之间空格，A4纸打印，详细信息见试卷后面介绍与说明。

我承诺：以下内容是完全由我自己独立完成的。签名：__________

Martin Luther King‟s Nonviolence Movements

Martin Luther King, Jr. was well known as an inspired black leader, a great speaker and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Almost every young people has heard his famous speech “I Have a Dream”, which ignited the world and a generation in the course for American civil rights. Although his life was extinguished more than 30 years, but his spirit of pursuing equal rights through nonviolence movements and his contribution to American civil development are still here.

I. A brief introduction of Martin Luther King‟s life

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the middle child of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King.

Growing up in Atlanta, King attended Booker T. Washington High School. He skipped both the ninth and the twelfth grade and entered Morehouse College at age fifteen without formally graduating from high school. In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology, and enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. King married Coretta Scott, on June 18, 1953 and became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama when he was twenty-five years old in 1954.

In 1955, King finished his Ph.D. in systematic theology, and then he led the Montgomery bus boycott. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed in 1957 and King was named first president one month later. In the year of 1959, King visited India where he reinforced and expanded his biblical convictions and studied Gandhi‟s method of nonviolent protest. On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis.

II.King‟s nonviolence movements

i.Gandhi and Thoreau‟s influences on his thoughts

Martin Luther King‟s unique contribution to the civil rights movement rooted in his reliance on Christian philosophical principles. With these principles, he mixed the example of Mohandas Gandhi who was the leader of the passive resistance movement that helped free India from British domination.King visited Gandhi's birthplace in India in 1959. The trip to India affected King in a profound way, which deepened his understanding of nonviolent resistance and his commitment to America's struggle for civil rights. King once said, “I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi, the only way morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”(张轶君, 2009, p170)

During his time in university, King carefully studied the books of the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau.“Walden,” one of Thoreau‟s books, was regarded as a personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, manual of self-reliance, and masterpiece of style. Under the influences of his books, King developed his thoughts on nonviolence and insist to urge people to disobey laws that were not just and to be willing to go to prison for their beliefs.

As King studied, he realized that the ideas of Gandhi and Thoreau—nonviolence and civil disobedience—could be used together to win equal rights for his people. ii.His personal experiences

When Martin Luther King was a child, he did not realize the racial separation until