Response essay/need feedback on paragraphing and grammar/

Response to Jane Tompkins
Knowing what happened and how did it happened are very difficult to obtain when there are multiple conflicting versions exist. In the “Indians”: Textualism, Morality, and the problem of History, Jane Tompkins evaluates the responses from different time period about what happened between Europeans and Indians in 17th century. During the process of gathering reliable information, she demonstrates that although the fact can always be viewed in many different ways, the content of fact remains the same. As an individual, reading Tompkins’ given examples of bias give me an insight into the power of social ethos that dominates our very opinions and attitudes. As a student, reading Tompkins’method of comparing and contrasting different responses teach me that learning the facts without evaluating different perspectives can never give one a full description of the event.
I believe we all have tendency to build our opinions based on our cultural background and the society we live in. Tompkins describes Perry Miller’s white supremacy for seeing other race and nation as “vacant” and “tawdry”. When Tompkins criticizes Miller’s ignorance as a history writer, she points out:“It suggests that which is invisible to the historian in his own historical moment remains invisible when he turns his gaze to the past” (Tompkins 650). We should neither blame Miller’s white supremacy nor accept his belief even though we are taught to believe in racial equality in our time. Like him, our thinking is the product of our time and upbringing. For example, Vaughan’s dislike of Indians’cultural backwardness reflects the white supremacy of the Europeans in 17th century. Similarly, Rowlandson’s complaint of smoking in Indian culture also underlines the Puritan values. The writer in 70s, Jennings, who brutally attacks the Europeans for exploiting Indians contradicts the accounts of those which criticized Indians’savage nature centuries ago. As a reader, I can easily fell into either positive or negative description. Then, I might start to bias against the account of one historian and support the account of others simply because their perspectives correspond to my own perspective. Likewise, isn’t Tompkins also a biased one when she cannot decide which account is reliable, and attempts to turn down these biased second-handed accounts for the primary sources? Is it possible that her romantic fascination with the nomadic life of Indian people pre-determines the way she evaluate these various accounts? If we can put aside our own bias before we consider the perspectives of others or look at issues with objectivity, I think we can eliminate more biases and get closer to the fact.
As a student, I think Jane Tompkins points out many helpful ways for reducing the biases, which including our own bias as researchers and the bias of historians. Although we can never find out the exact truth, we should not reject the perspectives of others simply because we judge their thoughts by the standard of our modern values. Consider different perspectives regarding one event can help us trace back the cultural or social values from different era, and the purpose of looking back upon history is not to repeat the mistake in future. Therefore, more researches are needed to detect the common ideas from these various accounts. Like Tompkins says, using relativism can be a better way for us to decide for ourselves which information is well-supported by reasons, filter out the extreme bias, and combine all these perspectives together to form a thorough description of history.