Review Essay: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West By Stephen E. Ambrose

Authors

John L. Allen, University of Connecticut

Date of this Version

1996

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 16:3 (Summer 1996). Copyright © 1996 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

From time to time, a serious book excites the imaginations of a vaster public than the audience of scholarly journals. Because the Center for Great Plains Studies has, over the past sixteen years, sponsored the reediting and publication of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, we could not help but notice the enormous popular success of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. To provide a focus on some of the scholarly concerns raised by this new text, we invited three prominent scholars to review the book from their own particular perspectives: Geography; Native American Studies; and Environmental History. The results of our invitations follow.