Errand Into The Wilderness Summary

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Jane Tompkins wanted to know the answer to the question of, “All I wanted was a general ideal of what happened between the English settlers and natives in the seventeenth-century New England.” (Tompkins200) She had no ideal of confusing or false information she would come into while trying to find an answer. She researched several writers and scholars who only told half the truth and not the full facts. She saw in the writers writing their opinion instead of facts. Her first research began with Perry Miller who wrote about the movement of European culture. Miller showed in his writing how bias he was with seeing the truth about the Indians. In the preface of his book Errand into the Wilderness he bluntly not acknowledge the Indians by using the word vacant, “the massive narrative of the movement of European culture onto the vacant wilderness of…show more content…
Writer Alden Vaughn, who wrote a book New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675, which this book is really explicit toward the Puritans and Indians. He feels like one was unified, visionary, disciplined, and dynamic while the other was divided, self-satisfied, undisciplined, and static. Also saying that the Puritans and Indians couldn’t live side by side with no penetration of more fragmented and passive by the more consolidated and active.(202,13) From what Tompkin already knew she knew that what Vaughn was saying was not true. The vision that Vaughn was given to his readers it’s not like that anymore. According to John Higham he says in his book, New Directions in American Intellectual History that Vaughn may have written this book before the events in the sixties. Because it after a study it offered a different picture of the European-Indians encounters and their social issues. So Tompkins is now seeing that the sources that she thought would be helpful turned out to be very bias and not truth telling about the Puritans and
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