• Research Paper on:
    American West and Frontier Perceptions

    Number of Pages: 7

     

    Summary of the research paper:

    In seven pages this paper examines how various authors have perceived the frontier and the American West in the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Eric Gary Anderson, Patricia Limerick, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Jame Tompkins. Ten sources are cited in the bibliography.

    Name of Research Paper File: D0_TJAwest1.rtf

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    Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
    such as argued by Jane Tompkins or whether or not cultural beliefs, and indeed the perspective of the Native Americans, should be ignored in regards to the documentation of history  and history should just relate to the major chronological events as postulated by Frederick Jackson Turner. Secondly, contemporary historians such as Patricia Limerick and Eric Gary Anderson have changed the  sequential historical paradigms used by Turneresque historians and instead used the writings of N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko among others to develop models of the Southwest which overlap and  intersect different multicultural components found in order to provide nonsequential paradigms where time, space, frontiers, and crossings are boundless and in addition provide present and future existences which show the  Euro-American "conquering" and influence on the West as only a small "blip" in regards to overall perception. In Jane Tompkins  "Indians: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History" published in 1985, she confronts the area of historical confusion based on the perspectives of the Native and the Euro-American encounters. Basically  she find that the problem in exploring the essence of history lies in the fact that "if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observers frame  of reference, then one will never know, in any given case, what really happened" (Tompkins, Indians, 60; Cochran 69). In this case, all historical references must be taken that they  have a subjective element to them and in none of the cases would any reports be truly objective. Tompkins make a good case on the subjective nature of the essence  of history in that fact that all elements related from those who experienced events or heard about events would be ultimately skewed to favor peoples personal feelings and this "residue 

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