Bold Journey | Social Sensitivity

Bold Journey Social Sensitivity

Although the time of the narrative is the first decade of the last century, when social concerns were quite different from those of today, Bold Journey reveals a remarkable sensitivity to people and events. This is particularly true in the episodes involving Native Americans. Without becoming sentimentalized or historically misrepresented, they appear as human as anyone else. The episode involving a 2848 Bold Journey squaw's reunion with her brother, a Shoshone chieftain, is especially moving, as is the greeting between the white men and the Indians noted above. Frictions among the soldiers and the others in the Corps of Discovery also reveal social concerns, as in Jack Newman's feelings about slavery and his position as a soldier under the command of two slave-owners. Nothing is made of America's "manifest destiny," its conquest of all the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific—rightly so, as the doctrine was developed much later....
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