Research Paper on:
Jane Tompkins' Indians Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
the Puritans and the Native Americans for a college class that she was teaching. Unfortunately, it wasnt as simple as she thought. What resulted was a lengthy essay on how  history and accurate depictions of events are influenced and submersed, subverted by the cultural perceptions of the writer. She states: "The problem is 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, 2002). Having identified the problem, then, she  sets about to see if she might find at least one true account of the way Puritans and American Indians acted and reacted toward one another. Her first search brought  her to some primary sources, in particular Perry Miller. She is appalled at what she finds. Miller writes several lines that Tompkins says floors her: "...the massive narrative of the  movement of European culture into the vacant wilderness of America"(Tompkins, 2002). The word vacant is what really amazes her, here. The land wasnt vacant at all, but to most preconceptions,  there were no others of value on the land. What she draws from this, and illustrates her point that historians can be influenced to write fiction as fact, is that  historians that ignore crucial elements doom those very elements to invisibility for future generations. To Miller, the Indians that were already there, didnt count. The next source that she comes  upon is called, New England Frontier: Purians and the Indians, by Alden Vaughn. At first, Tompkins was gratified to see that Vaughn was beginning to correct some of the obvious  and blinding errors from Millers account. But, true to her earlier assumptions, Vaughn also allows his own ethnic bias to shine through: The root of the misunderstanding [about Puritans and