Staff Reports
The Library of Congress just put Lewis and Clark back on the main stage. Two new books and a National Book Festival program brought fresh takes on the expedition into living rooms across the country, thanks to a recorded conversation now making the rounds on public TV and online. If you care about American history — or how we keep re-telling it — pay attention. This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a push to reshape the story of Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, and the long American West.
Library of Congress Spotlight: a new look at an old trek
At the National Book Festival, the Library of Congress hosted a program called “Rediscovering Lewis and Clark.” The session featured Craig Fehrman and Elizabeth Adelman, who each wrote new 2026 books about the Corps of Discovery. The event was recorded and made available by the Library, and public broadcasters picked it up. That festival stage is the news peg — it’s what put these new interpretations into a national conversation.
Fehrman and Adelman: two books, two fresh angles
Fehrman’s book reframes the expedition as a crowded, complicated enterprise with many players, not just two heroic captains. Adelman’s book follows the plants the expedition collected and shows how they changed science and culture afterward. Together they argue that people, plants, and overlooked figures like Sacagawea mattered a lot more than old simple stories let on. Fine. History is always richer when it admits more facts.
Media push: PBS, C-SPAN and the revival of the Lewis and Clark story
Once the Library of Congress put the conversation online, PBS and C-SPAN helped amplify it. Public television has been re-running segments that emphasize voices beyond Lewis and Clark, and Book TV-style coverage gave the festival session a wider audience. The result: the public gets to see the expedition through new lenses — people and plants, politics and survival — rather than a two-man myth on a stamp.
Conclusion: keep the facts, lose the fawning
It’s good to learn more about Sacagawea, York, the interpreters and even the monkeyflower. We should welcome clearer history. But let’s not turn every revision into a morality play or a political test. Celebrate the broader cast, study the records, and give the National Book Festival credit for putting the debate on camera. History grows when we add facts, not when we rewrite heroes to fit a headline. That’s a lesson the new Lewis and Clark conversation delivers — whether you liked the old story or just want a better one.
