Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide expands and transforms this familiar story by exploring the social and cultural landscapes the expedition traversed. Two perspectives on America came together in 1804-06. Lewis and Clark, men shaped by Jefferson's Enlightenment ideals, encounted an Indian world they only partly understood. Traveling through Native lands, the explorers experienced moments of discovery that revealed the contrasts, similarities, and creative exchange of ideas that occur when different worlds encounter each other face-to-face. This navigation across the social divide is a story as tense and complex as the crossing of the physical landscape. For twenty-first-century Americans who continue to explore cross-cultural frontiers two centuries later, here is a fresh and provocative telling of one of our nation's foundational narratives.
Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide also follows the explorers' steps by reconstructing the richly physical worlds of the expedition. Gathered in this lavish volume are 400 illustrations, the stunning results of a five-year enterprise to trace and authenticate the original artifacts, documents, maps, and artworks of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Scattered for two hundred years, the surviving physical evidence is now reassembled from more than fifty lending institutions and individuals across the United States. The result is a breathtaking new view of the equipment the expedition used as well as the color, complexity, and diversity of the cultures they encountered - items that gavbe the young Republic its first glimpse of what later became the cross-continental nation. A concluding essay weaves together contemporary tribal perspectives to summarize Native American experiences since Lewis and Clark's visit, mapping out a powerful-and hopeful-vision for the future.
24 cm x 31 cm 424 page hard cover.