evidence: The curricular standards emphasize the importance of attending to writing across genres and especially to nonfictional prose, and thus it's worth noting that over the past few decades the canon has expanded to include a lot of such writing. To focus on just the 1820–1865 selections in the Norton [Anthology of American Literature]: we have Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Lincoln, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Margaret Fuller, Caroline Kirkland, and others, and these authors are addressing such issues as slavery, race, nationhood, the frontier, social reform, democracy, nonconformity, and women's rights. I can assure you that they were thinking rhetorically about how to make an impact on readers, and the way that they try to do that is very much worth studying and talking about. In my presentation tomorrow, I'm going to focus on Douglass and Emerson as figures who influence writers of their own time and beyond. But they were also writers who shared in a vision of the importance of democracy to American life and letters and sought to convey their thoughts to ordinary readers.