Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness
Books / Paperback
Books › History › United States › General
ISBN: 0375700714 / Publisher: Vintage, February 2004
An account of the famed expedition draws on the personal journals of the explorers to re-examine their odyssey in light of the cultural prejudices and goals of Lewis and Clark, and discusses the meaning and impact of the journey.
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This provocative work challenges traditional accounts of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's expedition across the continent and back again. Uncovering deeper meanings in the explorers' journals and lives, Exploring Lewis and Clark exposes their self-perceptions and deceptions, and how they interacted with those who traveled with them, the people they discovered along the way, the animals they hunted, and the land they walked across. The book discovers new heroes and brings old ones into historical focus.Thomas P. Slaughter interrogates the explorers' dreams, how they wrote and what they aimed to possess, their interactions with animals, Indians, and each other, their sense of themselves as leaders and men, and why they feared that they had failed their nation and President. Slaughter's Lewis and Clark are more confused, frightened, courageous, and flawed than in previous accounts. They are more human, their expedition more dramatic, and thus their story is more revealing about our own relationships to history and myth.
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