What verbal is in this sentence. Attending the concert was the highlight of our week. And what job is the verbal doing?

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henry david thoreau and ralph warren emerson earned the name transcendentalists.you could assume that transcendentalists come from a well educated background from people that were alive before the american civil war.these people, mostly new englanders, mostly around boston, were attempting to create a uniquely american body of literature. it was already decades since the americans had won independence from england. and so they deliberately went about creating literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other writing that were clearly different from anything from england, france, germany, or any other european nation.another way to look at the transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religion in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made available.