Good afternoon. Welcome to the first in our lecture series on the main literary movements in United States history. In this class, we are going to cover nine different movements in literature and discuss the origins and common beliefs of each movement. In this, our first class, I'd like to take some time to give you an overview of these nine movements as a starting point. I'll go over the period of time each movement covers, the place in the US where it got its start, the key figures in each movement, and the core beliefs of each. We won't have time in the course to cover all literary movements, so we're going to be focusing on the general time period of the 19th and 20th centuries. More specifically, this course will cover most of the important literary movements from 1830 to around 1940. The first literary movement we'll be looking at in detail is called Transcendentalism. The reason we choose this as our starting point is that writers of this movement or period are the first to show a clear difference from British writers and British cultural tradition and heritage.