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Analysis Of Jane Tompkins 'Errand Into The Wilderness'

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Jane Tompkins, when researching about Indians while preparing to teach a course on colonial America, encountered a problem. This problem was that if the events of history were determined by the “observer’s frame of reference”, then we might never know what really happened. To begin with, Tompkins was just choosing which authors to believe, but then she realized that the problem was far more complicated than that. Faced with excessive amount of point of views, she approached primary sources for clarification, only to find out that they duplicated the problem all over again. Her research commenced with Errand into the Wilderness by Perry Miller, just to find out he overlooks the fact that there were people who inhabited the lands he was studying.
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