• Anne Bradstreet exhibits the Puritan “plain style” in her poetry • Mary Rowlandson’s account of her 11­week captivity encouraged anti­Indian sentiment in the colonies • From her writings, Abigail Adams shows early feminist causes • Meriwether Lewis contributed vast knowledge of botany, geology, and geography in his journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition • In his poem “Thanatopsis”, William Cullen Bryant exhibits both transcendental and Calvinist elements • Show how Concord, Massachusetts was the first rural American artist’s colony offering a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism • Ralph Waldo Emerson reveals his transcendentalist beliefs in his essay “Self­ Reliance” • Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “From Nature” reflects the 19th Century romantic thought • Ralph Waldo Emerson took much of his spiritual insight from readings of Eastern religions as seen in his poem, “Brahma” • Transcendentalists like Bronson Alcott and Robert Owens and George and Sophia Ripley created experimental utopian colonies to counteract the attitudes created by the Industrial Revolution • Transcendentalism was a philosophical, literary, social, and theological Movement • Civil disobedience and peaceful resistance used today by activists had their base from Henry David Thoreau’s beliefs • Edgar Allan Poe was culturally informed, not isolated, as a writer during his time • Sojourner Truth encouraged abolitionism and women’s suffrage in her evangelistic preaching • Walt Whitman’s greatest legacy is the invention of American free verse • Walt Whitman conveys the nation’s loss of Abraham Lincoln in “O Captain! My Captain” and “When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloomed” • Emily Dickinson often wrote her poems from the perspective of the dead • Emily Dickinson often relied on her education in the sciences for the subjects of many of her poems • In Kate Chopin’s short stories, characters search for female spiritual emancipation • Muckrakers Ida Tarbell, Jane Addams, and Upton Sinclair through their writings were successful social reformers in the 19th Century • Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African­American poet to express lyrical qualities of the black dialect • Through his writings and political activism, W. E. B. DuBois was one of the most influential African Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries • Robert Frost wrote many poems drawing ideas from his own life, recurrent losses and everyday tasks • William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor, novelist, essayist, playwright and poet experimented with meter and images when writing about everyday people • Harlem Renaissance Poets set the tone and imagery with language choice to represent realism and idealism in their poetry • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway portrays the theme of “the lost generation: showing the disillusionment of Americans after World War I • Twain is admired for capturing typical American experiences in a language which is realistic and charming. .