Good Fight, The (ATOM Study Guide)

The Good Fight: America's Ongoing Struggle for Justice depicts the sporadically violent, often triumphant, always risky struggle to fulfill the promise of freedom and equality for all. Fought in the streets, the courthouse, and the corridors of Congress, it is a story that has become America's own morality play. Through photographs, videos, infographics and essays, The Good Fight documents America's resistance to injustice.

It depicts the enormous strides that the United States has made against intolerance. The book is dedicated to celebrating, in words and photographs, the many Americans who have fought for and are continuing to fight for the right to be treated equally, with dignity and respect, despite differences including race, faith, national origin, or sexual orientation.

In his foreword We Go Back to the Well, Bret Stephens acknowledges the book's significance: But what makes The Good Fight an important addition to the literature on civil rights is its powerful reminder that American civic courage is not simply the story of a few heroes. On the contrary, it is the story of millions of Americans who took the Founders at their word and demanded that the promise be redeemed.

One of the lessons the 'good fight' has left us, in all its many episodes, is that when we get it right, when we extend the blessings of 'liberty' to the people we have once maligned as 'other', they not only flourish, they also add new richness to the American story. – Todd Brewster, Author.

The Good Fight is a 258-page hardcover large-format book created by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt containing essays, photographs and infographics. The book is powered by an interactive viewer app. The free app enables readers to access multimedia content by pointing the camera on their smartphone or tablet towards pages flagged with an orange icon. The app is available for download from the App Store, GooglePlay or by visiting <thegoodfightviewer.com>.

Schools are recommended to purchase copies of the book for classroom use and for students to use in conjunction with the interactive viewer app.

Curriculum Links:

The Good Fight is a recommended resource for students in grades 7–12 in the learning areas of English, Humanities and Social Sciences and The Arts. It is a valuable resource for extended investigations, interdisciplinary projects and inquiry-based learning tasks exploring injustice and the fight for justice. The activities reinforce critical social and emotional learning skills:

• through engaging students in conversations about tolerance
• through challenging bias
• through promoting diversity

The activities allow students to develop their capacity to explore, justify and defend their opinions and research findings in oral, written and multimodal forms to an audience. Students can work individually and collaboratively to complete the activities.

Key learning objectives for students:

• to examine diversity in social, cultural, political and historical contexts.
• to respond to diversity by showing empathy, respect, understanding and connection.
• to analyse the harmful impact of prejudice and discrimination.
• to examine individual and institutional situations of injustice both historic and recent.
• to identify the positive and negative impacts of power and privilege.
• to identify people, places and events relevant to the history of social justice in the United States.
• to recognise their responsibility to speak up with courage to challenge prejudice, exclusion and injustice.