Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest recorded depiction of civil disobedience appears in Sophocles' play Antigone, where Oedipus's daughter defies King Creon to bury her brother Polynices. This ancient Greek drama presents one of the first examples of a person obeying conscience over human law.
Henry David Thoreau wrote Resistance to Civil Government in 1849, but the essay was published under the title Civil Disobedience four years after his death in 1866. By that time the term had achieved fairly widespread usage in sermons and lectures relating to slavery and the war in Mexico.
Mahatma Gandhi led campaigns for independence from the British Empire during the 1920s in India by making salt in violation of and protest against British salt laws. He often quoted Percy Shelley's Mask of Anarchy to vast audiences during the campaign for a free India.
Ronald Dworkin held that there are three types of civil disobedience: integrity-based justice-based and policy-based. Integrity-based civil disobedience occurs when a citizen disobeys a law they feel is immoral, justice-based happens when citizens disobey laws to claim rights denied to them, and policy-based occurs when a person breaks the law to change a policy they believe is dangerously wrong.
Zaghloul Pasha masterminded a massive civil disobedience movement starting in 1914 and peaking in 1919 in Egypt. His leadership helped achieve independence for Egypt and a first constitution in 1923 through the Wafd Party.