A Better Hypertext of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”

, only a brief report, since instead of my usual Picket Line activities, I decided to tackle a project that had been on my to-do list for a while: to put a better version of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience on-line.

There are many, many versions of Civil Disobedience on-line, but I was never very happy with any of them. Most, if not all, suffered from copying errors, for one thing — missing words or phrases, mistyped words (“humanity” for “humility”), and the like. I don’t claim that my version is free from such errors, but at least as I catch them I can fix them.

I took the liberty also in my version of inserting hyperlinks in the text to source documents that Thoreau quotes (a speech of Daniel Webster’s, works of Shakespeare, a poem of Charles Wolfe, etc.), as well as to Wikipedia or other explanatory articles that give more context about the Mexican-American war, American politics, and such. As a final touch, I labeled each paragraph with a marker so that they can be individually referenced in a hyperlink — for instance, you can link directly to the paragraph that begins

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts…

by using the following link: https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=rtcg#p20 — change the “20” in “#p20” to another number if you want to link to a different paragraph.