Some basic info on Esperanto.

Please note: Some links and a downloadable document are mentioned at the end of this post

Created by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof (1859 – 1917). Zamenhof was born in Białystok, now a city in Poland but then part of the Russian Empire. At that time Białystok was a diverse and multi-ethnic city. The four main languages used were Yiddish, Polish, German and Russian. He witnessed many ethnic conflicts and assumed (probably naively) that much of the strife was due to the lack of a common language that all could use on an equal basis.

As a teenager attending school in Warsaw (also part of Russia at the time) he began his first attempts to create an international language. The idea wasn't to replace anyone's first language but give people a tool to use in certain situations that would not give one language group an advantage over others. His father wasn't impressed and destroyed his first notes and Ludwig was forced to study medicine in Moscow.

He returned to his language project and eventually with financial help from his future father-in-law published the first book about his language Lingvo internacia: Antaŭparolo kaj plena lernolibro (The International Language: Foreword and complete textbook) in 1887. He published the book in Russian and didn't use his real name. He chose a penname Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful) and Esperanto eventually became identified as the name of the language. This booklet included the Lord's Prayer, some Bible verses, a letter, two poems, sixteen rules of grammar and 900 roots of vocabulary. Over the next few years editions were published in Russian, Hebrew, Polish, French, German, and English. At the time the poetry was probably meant to show the potential of the language.

More basic information on Zamenhof can be found here.

Some basic grammatical info can be downloaded here. This mentions things covered in class.

Probably the best all purpose intro site on Esperanto can be found at lernu.net. 
The site is available in very many languages. Here are links in

English

Polish

Spanish

Other versions can be found in the upper right hand corner of the intro page. Choose your language and then click where it says Ek!