Jane Tompkins

Focus Paper on Tompkins


In the document, "Indians: Textualism, Morality, and The Problem of History," Jane Tompkins examines the conflicts between the English settlers and the American Indians. After examining several primary sources, Tompkins found that different history books have different perspectives. It wasn’t that the history books took different angles that were troubling, but the viewpoints contradicted one another. People who experience the same event told it through their reality. This becomes a problem when a person who didn’t experience the effect wants to know what happened. Tompkins stated, "The problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer’s frame of reference, that one will never know, in any given case what really happened."
The problem was evident when Tompkins was researching the history of the Europeans and Indians. She started her inquiry with the book “Errand into the Wilderness” by Perry Mill...