American Epic Research Articles

Crossing the Line in the Sand: Francis Drake Imitating Ferdinand Magellan in Juan de Miramontes's Armas antárticas

This article examines the third canto of Juan de Miramontes's colonial Latin American epic, Armas antárticas (1608-1609), in which Francis Drake narrates the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to Elizabeth I of England. The study begins by analyzing how Armas antárticas portrays Magellan as an epic hero and defuses certain long-standing controversies surrounding him by appealing to classical epic models and judiciously drawing from historiographic texts. Despite the general effectiveness of this portrayal, however, Armas antárticas creates entirely new problems for the perception of Magellan by presenting him as a precursor of Drake. In fact, the text poetically and ironically suggests that Magellan transgressed the antimeridian of the Line of Tordesillas, and in doing so preceded Drake in his piratical activities in the Pacific. In this way Armas antárticas evinces unexpected parallels with ideas about piracy and international law expressed by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in Mare liberum (1609).

Review: Tories Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War, Liberty's Exiles American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, the Civil War of 1812 American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies

TORIES Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War Thomas B. Alien New York: HarperCollins, 2010. 468pp, $18.99 paper. ISBN 978-0061241802LIBERTY'S EXILES American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World Maya Jasanoff New York: Knopf, 2011. 46opp, $30.00 doth. ISBN 978-1400041688THE CIVIL WAR OF 1812 American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, e[ Indian Allies Alan New York: Knopf, 2010. 62opp, $18.00 paper. ISBN 978-1400042654The adage that everybody loves a winner certainly rings true when one considers the long and mostly one-sided historiography of the American revolution. Since the i8th century the patriots have enjoyed not only the most favourable attention, but most of the attention, period. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that historians have typically depicted the revolution as a mortal struggle between gallant, freedom-loving Americans and sneering, freedom-denying Britons. This distortion has obscured the fundamental truth that it was just as much a civil war, one fought bitterly between American patriots and American loyalists. The losers, the loyalists, have been neglected by historians (except in Canada, to some extent, where they have been recast as winners because of their role in building postwar British North America). Even in Canada, however, the story of the loyalists has hardly been a hot academic topic in recent years.This lack of interest in the loyalists means that many misconceptions remain about who they were, what they stood for, and what their long-term significance was. Fortunately, three new books by American historians, each covering a different chapter of the story, aim to correct the record. Thomas B. Alien's Tones details the extensive civilian and military involvement of loyalists in the revolution itself. Maya JasanofPs Liberty's Exiles traces the divergent paths of the tens of thousands of loyalists who left their homes during and shortly after the revolution and resettled throughout the British empire. Alan Taylor s The Civil War 0/1812 demonstrates that the divided loyalties that characterized the revolutionary era carried over into the next, in a war that helped to define national identities on both sides of the CanadianAmerican border. Each book is well worth reading in its own right. Read collectively, the three works will give even the most knowledgeable reader a refreshing new appreciation of the arduous life stories - and complex, often conflicting views - of the loyalists.It makes sense to read and review the books in chronological order, beginning with Tones. Alien's eclectic body of work spans topics as disparate as The Bonus Army: An American Epic (with Paul Dickson); Possessed, an account of the events that inspired the 19705 book and film The Exorcist; and illustrated works about the natural including The Shark Almanac. His latest effort is, without question, a serious historical study. It is based on archival research, published collections of documents and correspondence, and the immense array of professional and hobbyist websites devoted to the American revolution. Everything has been carefully footnoted and the bibliography is extensive, though he relies perhaps a bit too heavily on the websites.Alien deserves credit for bringing to light the substantial part that the loyalists played in supporting Great Britain during the revolution. This is an important task for two reasons: American authors tend to ignore loyalists, and Canadian authors tend to pick up their story only after their exile to British North America. He tells their story chronologically, starting in 1769 and building dramatic tension as he explains how the political situation deteriorated in the 13 colonies, culminating in the outbreak of hostilities in 1774. Even before the shot heard round the world, Americans were being forced into with-us-or-against-us identities as either patriots or loyalists. Alien clearly sympathizes with the individuals who welcomed political reforms but could not break their ties to the crown, despite threats of violence from their neighbours. …

The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo (review)

Reviewed by: The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo Logan Esdale Catherine Morley. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo. New York: Routledge, 2009. viii + 218 pp. For The Quest for Epic, Catherine Morley selected three American novelists who were born in the Depression and came of age in the 1950s, a decade of (as she says) profound national “myth-making” (144). John Updike was born in 1932, Philip Roth in 1933, and Don DeLillo in 1936. Their lives’ work attracted Morley because it covers the last half century of American history, from the beginning of the Cold War to millennial reflections. Midcentury mythmakers asserted the nation’s autonomy and uniformity, with the white male as its representative figure, its hero. By century’s close, however, America could not ignore its pluralist and global aspects. Above all, Morley is looking for “an evolving rather than static national consciousness” (75). While Updike, Roth, and (to a much lesser extent) DeLillo put their backs to the national border and documented everyday American life, they also, Morley argues, gave their work a transnational identity. There are nine texts under consideration, five by Updike—the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom series (published in 1960published in 1971published in 1981published in 1990, and 2000)—a Roth trilogy with Nathan Zuckerman as narrator—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—and DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). The series, trilogy, [End Page 627] and novel ultimately have transnational identities because they follow the epic tradition of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Morley recognizes the “home-grown influences on their work,” Emerson’s in particular, but she focuses on how they “transformed the American epic by imbibing and re-working aspects of the Joycean epic” (33). “Genre transcends the national,” she says (32). Morley’s argument hinges on showing this Joycean influence and the extent to which these novels are rightly called prose epics, and in this regard she succeeds. As the “genre most associated with the national” (36), she writes, the epic enables “the nation to recognise itself” (44). However, while the epic is “locally and nationally specific,” it also “includes remnants and textures of other cultural edifices” (18). The epic remains what it was centuries ago, “the ‘book of the tribe’, a chronicle rooted in communal experience” (54), but it now also includes “those forbidden ‘true stories’ which have been systematically suppressed and omitted from the official, homogenous histories of nations” (47). Whether in poetry or prose, the epic is a “palimpsest” with allusions to a diversity of sources, from old plays and poems to recent newspapers and songs (150). The prose epic in Morley’s definition is thus a paradox, its inclusiveness making it both a “means of nation-building” (126) and an ideal genre for “destabilising” the nation-state (17). This genre not only transcends the national “on the strength of the number and sophistication of its generic crosscurrents” (29), it pluralizes national identity by telling a “popular history” (47). And although the modern epic continues to be “a predominantly masculine genre,” its hero is presented ironically (6). With Leopold Bloom in Ulysses as exemplar, the questing hero is mired in unexalted, domestic realities and is unknown in the public arena (67). Time ticks on without redemption or enlightenment in the conclusion. Moreover, the hero-protagonist is not a true-blood citizen: Bloom is Hungarian-Irish, Zuckerman is Jewish-American, and Nick Shay in Underworld is Italian-American. From this perspective “he writes himself into the larger world,” as DeLillo has said (qtd. in Morley 137). In short, the hyphenated identity of the epics’ heroes echo the mixed identity of the genre and the nation. American novelists are therefore drawn to the prose epic because of its “democratic sensibilities” and because it demands full reflection on the state of the nation (4). The writer’s historicizing abilities are tested. Morley asks whether, as their careers evolved, Updike and Roth were able to transcend the 1950s, that time when a “distinctly American canon as a response to matters of foreign policy” was formulated...

Subway Ride and Subway System in Hart Crane's “The Tunnel”

Criticism of Hart Crane's American epic Bridge has long focused on technological tropes. Readings of the subway's importance within the poem, however, tend to foreground the oppressive aspects of that space. This essay, by contrast, argues that New York's transit infrastructure enables Crane to re-imagine formal possibilities in the modernist poem. The Tunnel shows commuters ultimately making sense of their fragmented perceptions through routine and habit. abstract subway system, the poem suggests, is only knowable through an accretion of partial information that comes from regular rides. This mediated relationship of part to whole plays out in Crane's poetics, suggesting a new way in which we might understand how mechanized routine and urban space shapes modernist literary form .

From Our Own

Page 30 American Book Review FROM OUR OWN We wanted to find America through the gasps of snow that fell like last century’s angels. —Kevin Prufer With these lines, Kevin Prufer joins a tradition of America singing that in the work of nineteenthand twentieth-centuries bards such as Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Ted Hughes, and Allen Ginsberg has been celebratory and lyric in its song of an America vast and intimate and brave. It is a tradition, that though it has sometimes naively stumbled on its own path of guileless praise, nevertheless has had as its end the poet’s shameless claim on his earned place in it. Prufer’s complex and utterly beautiful National Anthem haunts and proclaims in subtle ways that recover the possibility of the American epic for a millennial and skeptical generation. Part 1 continues a theme Prufer explored more transparently in Fallen From a Chariot (2005): the fall of Rome as allegory for late imperialist/capitalist America. Here is an America where the pastoral blush of flowers has been replaced with parachute’s silent bloom; where the comfort of religion in the person of the pastor is juxtaposed with the violence of assassination; where the faded military glory of the Caesars, octogenarians who dodder in their hospital and “dream / of Rome. Gone, the snow. Gone, the stutter and the aged gait”; whereAncient Rome itself has been personified, infantilized, and impotent, so that the traveler finds it, “…curled on a pew, asleep. // Someone had dressed you in rags and old columns. / Someone had covered you with yesterday’s news.” Other pasts are suggested as well, most beautifully, theAmerican West, boyish as a young Walt Whitman loafing on the grass and who …slept on an open raft. His chest was brown and flecked with hair. Hat tipped forward to cover the eyes, one hand limp, cutting the water, the other draped over the thigh, touching the thigh. But rather than a new Eden, we are at the end of the history and nuclear bomb testing in the desert: One day the sky was blue as an eye pinned up. Then the flash and rush of wind, the talk that rose and split, and petals, gray and black. And lush. Part 1 suggests the journey of an indeterminate companion, “you” accompanying the speaker’s “I” through a sterile landscape of menace and alienation, even in postures of intimacy: “Beside a broken lamppost , you smiled. Such sharp teeth. We were always hungry then.” Their pairing seems to be one of protector and dependent, perhaps lover and beloved, in any case enabling survivors who navigate a recognizable , but strange landscape—most often suburban and Midwest—where the ghosts of prior empires, Czarist Russia, fallen Rome, mingle with our contemporary dreams of empire and the nightmares of soldiers at war. But the time of this apocalypse is not clear, except that “Around that time, the city grew quiet” and “Those days, the TVs stopped bothering us.” Certainly, it is a recent past of “Super 8, Waffle House, Motel 6” and from the title poem, of “Olive Garden and Exxon: Bed, Bath & Beyond, the stars that throw their/dimes around us all.” National Anthem haunts and proclaims in subtle ways that recover the possibility of the American epic for a millennial and skeptical generation. This is not poetry, however, that leans on popculture references in any of the conventional ways— whether for the disruptive value it can provide the surface in l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry or the particular allusive density that gives stand-up poetry its body, its digressive and democratic jangle.And in fact, the examples above are nearly the sum total of specific, topical references in the book. Automobiles and TVs (and metaphorically, “screens”—in the skull, behind the eyes, the lit windows of houses at night) gain allegorical weight through the course of the book, and certainly there is a kind of self-awareness in some of the poems. In one of the several poems that personify Empire, generally to infantilize it, the speaker declares: “It sat on the rocking chair, looking sincerely at the clock until I gave it...

New world poetics: nature and the Adamic imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott

This title offers a groundbreaking look at three major poets. This ecocritical and comparative study plumbs the earthly depth and social breadth of three of the Americas' most ambitious and epic-minded poets. From Walt Whitman's call for a poetry of New World possibility, to Pablo Neruda's invocation of an 'American love', to Derek Walcott's poetic ironies of an American epic, the adamic imagination of their poetry invokes the foundational powers of language before a natural world already transformed by human violence. George B. Handley explores the ecocritical foundations of American and Latin American studies, considers the relevance of ecology to each poet's ambition to recuperate the New World's lost histories, and provides a transnational poetics of understanding literary influence and textual simultaneity in the Americas. In their nuanced appreciation for the difficulty of balancing the demands of social justice within the context of deep time, these readings expose the symptomatic dangers as well as the healing potential of human self-consciousness in light of global environmental degradation.

The modernist papers

The Modernist Papers is a tour de force of analysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarities of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon, he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression, while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Challenging our previous understandings of the literature of this period, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.

Epic AIDS: Angels in America from stage to screen

Epic AIDS: Angels in America from stage to screen

"What Story What Story What Sound": The Nomadic Poetics of Myung Mi Kim's Dura

In Pollen Fossil Record, the last section of her fourth volume, Commons (2002), Myung Mi raises number of questions which underlie language-centered nomadic poetics she has developed since her first book, Under Flag (1991).What is now, in the face of mass global migration, ecological degradation, shifts and upheavals in identifications of gender and labor? How can the diction(s), register(s), inflection(s) as well as varying affective stances that have and will continue to filter into English be taken into account? What are the implications of writing at this moment, in precisely this America? How to practice and make plural the written and spoken-grammar, syntaxes, textures, intonations . . . . (Myung Mi 2002, HO)By exploring how the language and poetic form can be deployed in such way as to engage with historical and social changes, and to enact the experience of migration and displacement, departs from writing diasporas as theme to writing the impact of diasporas in terms of contaminated English, fragmented narratives, and dislocated, mobile words, images, and utterances.Her third book, Dura (1998) provides salient example of how responds to the questions and challenges she has posed, through an innovative nomadic poetics which sets Dura apart from her other volumes. Unlike Under Flag (1991), The Bounty (1996), or Commons (2002), Dura is one long poem, a kind of strange autobiography, and an interrogation of the materiality and apparatuses around words, word-making, which are related to questions about what gets written and by who, as indicated at reading of Dura at SUNY Buffalo on November 14, 1998.1 I would argue that the strangeness of Dura can be better understood not only in terms of Kim's theory about poetic form as interplay of mobile elements (2002, 108), but also by using Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's notions of rhizomatics to open up new possibilities for reading Dura as a kind of strange autobiography that has moved beyond subjectivity, and as book that finds adequate an outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than world to reproduce, to borrow Deleuze's and Guattari's words (2003, 24).So far no extensive reading has been devoted to Dura, though critics have explored certain aspects of the themes and poetics of this challenging book2. In her essay, 'Composed of Many Lengths of Bone': Myung Mi Kim's Reimagination of Image and Epic, Josephine Nock-Hee Park reads Kim against Ezra Pound's high modernist legacy, and Kim's redeployment of these aesthetic tools, which shows us new, strategic uses of this literary past (2006, 235). Park examines possible traces of Pounds Imagism in Kim's deployment of images, particularly the ways in which Kim's images of war and its aftermaths contrast with Pound's modernist appropriation of ideogrammatic imagery (239-40). Moreover, Park reads Dura along and against the American tradition of the epic. Drawing on James E. Miller's study of the American epic, Park traces Dura's immediate influence to Pound's The Cantos and to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, asserting that Dura is a refashioning of the American long poem as initiated by Walt Whitman (241, 242). Park contends that while his fantasy of the world providing models for coherent state that drives The Cantos does not fall apart, Pound laments that the poem does; in contrast, the world witnesses remains arbitrarily divided and she implicates attempts at spinning this fact into coherence (2006, 242). In addition, Park claims that follows the lineage of Cha's Dictee which reformulated the American long poem (242-43).By identifying Pound's The Cantos as the point of departure for Kim's Dura, Park confines the latter's innovation to binarized relationship with the former's ideological and poetic concerns, thus overlooking the latter's distinctive challenges and innovations which are irreducible to those attributes as measured against Pound's Imagism and the cantos. …

Book Review: The Bonus Army: An American Epic

Book Review: The Bonus Army: An American Epic

We of Film & History Have Been Busy. .. The Editor's Reflections and Reports

NEW MASTHEAD Although some things may change, others do not and we have been busy as usual at Film & History. Peter Rollins has become the Director of the Center for the Study of Film and History, allowing him the time to orchestrate larger projects while advising us here at the journal. As the new Editor-in-Chief, I am delighted to continue the outstanding thirty-seven year tradition of Film & History with the help of Cynthia Miller of Emerson College, our new Associate Editor-in-Chief. Cindy now wears two hats, as she continues to be one of our busy film review editors with the help of Solomon Davidoff (Suffolk University-Boston), who has joined our editorial crew. Mathew J. Bartkowiak (Michigan State University) will now assist our longtime, hard-working book review editor, Robert Fyne. To better live up to John E. O'Connor's founding mission for Film & History, our Pedagogy and Syllabus editorial staff has been expanded to include veteran Associate Editor Ron Briley, who will now tap the expert help of Alan Marcus (University of Connecticut) and Scott Metzger (Pennsylvania State University). Other new and skilled editorial staffers are Associate Editor, Ken Dvorak (San Jacinto College), who many of you probably know as the able organizer of the annual Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association conference and Keith Wheelock (Raritan Valley Community College), our Associate Editor who is a filmographer extraordinaire. We celebrate our good fortune to have all these energetic scholars here at Film & History. FILM & HISTORY LEAGUE CONFERENCE ON THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION (NOVEMBER 2006) We are delighted to report that Film & History sponsored yet another successful biennial conference in 2006, this time on Documentary Tradition. This thematic umbrella allowed a wide range of panels that you might like to review by visiting our website at www.filmandhistory.org. Much of that success is due to the large attendance, with over 500 participants, consisting of both august senior scholars and energetic graduate students. Convening at the Dolce Center in Dallas provided us with our own campus, with meeting rooms aplenty and an auditorium that accommodated all of our attendees for the many special events scheduled throughout the conference. Plenary sessions included both film scholars and filmmakers. The conference opened on Wednesday with two awardwinning documentarians, Allen and Cynthia Mondell of Media Projects, Inc. (Dallas), who have for twenty-five years produced films that address important social and cultural topics. Introduced by Barton Weis, president of the Video Association of Dallas, the Mondells presented film clips and offered insights into the challenges of independent documentary distribution. Wednesday evening, Jim Welsh, Editor Emeritus of Literature/Film Quarterly, with his usual aplomb, chaired a mega-panel of editors who offered advice on publication and overviews of the work of these journals. Editors included: Kathy Merlock Jackson of the Journal of American Culture, Gary Edgerton and guest editor John Tibbetts of the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Brett Bowles and Roel Vande Winkel of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Gerald Duchovnay of Post Script, and many from the Film & History editorial ranks. Thanks to all of these editors for sharing their expertise! The Thursday plenary sessions were equally edifying. In the afternoon, a special panel on the PBS documentary The March of the Bonus Army traced the process of bringing history to the screen with comments from historians and filmmakers. Lucy Barber, historian and National Archives staff member; author and producer Paul Dickson; assistant producer David Seitz, and the producer, Glenn Marcus, who brought his experience with PBS and the NEH, described the work they undertook to develop this film from conception to completion. In addition to the film, our readers may want to read The Bonus Army: An American Epic (Walker 2006), the book which provided the research base for this film. …

The Bonus Army: an American epic

The Bonus Army: an American epic

The Bonus Army: An American Epic (review)

Reviewed by: The Bonus Army: An American Epic G. Kurt Piehler The Bonus Army: An American Epic. By Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen. New York: Walker and Company, 2004. ISBN 0-8027-1440-4. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 370. $27.00. Drawing on an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, Bonus Army offers a riveting account of the struggle by World War I veterans to secure adjusted compensation—a bonus—from the federal government. Paul Dickson and Thomas Allen are not the first historians to write about the long struggle that began shortly after Armistice Day and continued until the bonus was finally paid in 1936, but they have offered a richly textured narrative that pays particular attention to experiences of the rank and file who participated in the Bonus Expeditionary Force. Dickson and Hart are at their best in describing how the corrosive impact of the Great Depression resulted in thousands of desperate veterans descending on the nation's capital in the summer of 1932 demanding an early payment of their bonuses. Living in abandoned government buildings and open fields in Anacostia Park in Washington, these proud veterans tried to maintain their dignity under trying circumstances. Despite the widely held belief of the Military Intelligence Division, General Douglas MacArthur, and the Hoover administration, more wives and children could be found among the bonus marchers than communists. For scholars, one of the strengths of Bonus Army is the focus on the question of race. Although the nation's capital remained a segregated southern city, the bonus encampments were integrated; moreover, black and white veterans marched together when they paraded on Pennsylvania Avenue or gathered on the Capitol grounds. Dickson and Allen are empathetic to the plight and grievances of the World War I veterans who sought a bonus. They skewer the Hoover administration for its insensitivity toward these veterans and lambast MacArthur for driving them out of Washington, D.C., at the point of a bayonet. They are also critical of the Roosevelt administration's effort to diffuse later bonus marches by sending destitute veterans to CCC camps in Florida where many would be killed tragically by a hurricane in 1935. Dickson and Allen write with sincere passion, but Bonus Army would have been a stronger book if the authors grappled with the question at the heart of the debate over the adjusted compensation: What does the nation owe to returning veterans? Do veterans have a special claim on the federal government? This reviewer wishes the authors had given the opponents of the bonus more of their due, especially given the diverse ideological opposition to it. Four presidents—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt—were against it. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover opposed it because they envisioned a limited role for the federal government and feared the immense cost to the public treasury. Roosevelt had fewer reservations about an expanded federal role and believed the national government should aid Americans buffeted by the Great Depression. He did not, however, believe healthy veterans, by virtue of their wartime service, should receive special benefits. [End Page 857] Dickson and Allen see the passage of the G.I. Bill of Rights in 1944 as a legacy of the Bonus March. Surprisingly, their account of the passage of this groundbreaking legislation does not draw upon the scholarship of either Davis R. B. Ross or Keith Olson, but relies on the superficial work of Milton Greenberg. In many ways, the Second World War veterans did not have to fight the same battles as their World War I counterparts. But the lingering debate over how to treat returning veterans continued after both Korea and Vietnam. In his forthcoming dissertation focusing on the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Vietnam Veteran, Mark Boulton of the University of Tennessee argues that the 1944 G.I. Bill of Rights did not permanently settle the debate central to the Bonus March. As presidents, both Dwight Eisenhower (an aide to MacArthur during the Bonus March) and later Lyndon B. Johnson sought to place strict limits on veterans' benefits. Like his Republican counterparts of the interwar years, Eisenhower believed in a more limited...

"What of the Partition": Dictee's Boundaries and the American Epic

"What of the Partition": Dictee's Boundaries and the American Epic

The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery

Book Review| January 01 2004 The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery, Gary E. Moulton. JEFF NICHOLS JEFF NICHOLS Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utah Historical Quarterly (2004) 72 (1): 88–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/45062844 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation JEFF NICHOLS; The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery. Utah Historical Quarterly 1 January 2004; 72 (1): 88–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/45062844 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressUtah Historical Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © COPYRIGHT 2004 UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery: The Abridgment of the Definitive Nebraska Edition (review)

The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery: The Abridgment of the Definitive Nebraska Edition (review)

Interpreting the Legacy by Interpreting the Relationship: The Creation of an American Epic by Engaging in Native‐American Kinship

Brian R. Holloway. Interpreting the Legacy: John Neihardt and Black Elk Speaks. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003. xiv. 220 pp.

The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery

The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery

The Lewis and Clark journals: an American epic of discovery: the abridgment of the definitive Nebraska edition

Two centuries ago, an American epic unfolded as and Clark's Corps of Discovery mapped the lands, described the natural wonders, and encountered the peoples of western North America. Following orders from President Thomas Jefferson, Captains Meriwether and William set out from Saint Louis in 1804 to search for a river passage to the Pacific Ocean. In their own words, recorded in the famous journals of and Clark, the members of the Corps of Discovery tell their story with an immediacy and power missing from second-hand accounts. All their triumphs and terrors are here - the thrill of seeing the vast herds of bison on the plains, the tensions and admiration in the first meetings with Indian peoples, Lewis's rapture at the stunning beauty of the Great Falls, the fear the captains felt when a devastating illness befell Shoshone interpreter Sacagawea, the ordeal of crossing the Continental Divide, Clark's joy at seeing the Pacific, miserable days of cold and hunger, and the kidnapping and rescue of Lewis's dog, Seaman. The natural wonders of an unspoiled America are captured in these pages. The lives and customs of its Native peoples also come vividly to life: and Clark's friendship with the Mandans and the Nez Perces, a deadly fight with the Blackfeet, and a series of intricate interactions and negotiations with numerous northwestern tribes. The cultural differences between the corps and the Indians make for living drama that is sometimes comic but more often poignant and, at least once, tragic. In this riveting account, editor Gary E. Moulton blends the narrative highlights of his definitive Nebraska edition of the Lewis and Clark journals. For the first time, the voices of the enlisted men and of the Native Americans are heard alongside the words of the captains. New maps and illustrations enrich this American epic of discovery. Gary E. Moulton is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of American History at the University of Nebraska. He is the recipient of the J. Franklin Jameson Award of the American Historical Association for the editing of the Lewis and Clark journals, and he won the Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award from the University of Nebraska.

The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery

Review of: The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery. Lewis, Meriwether et al.