Dead Certainties : Unwarranted Speculations

Schama writes an imaginative and illuminating history of two historical events: The death of General Wolfe in the Seven Years War and how it's perceived in popular culture and the murder of George Parkman in Boston leading to America's first celebrity trial. The second story is the more interesting to me, so intriguing that I actually jumped off the subway at one point to visit the scene of the crime (the building is long gone and even the street it's on is buried beneath the modern Mass General Hospital campus). Very exciting stuff about history and how it's perceived in later narratives.
Favorite Passages

"It was that most trying season in Boston: hopes of spring, of the green resurrection of the earth, were deadened by the obstinate show more grip of winter." - p. 251

"The 'Conclusion' that every doctoral adviser urges on his students as a professional obligation has always seemed to my notoriously inconclusive temperament to be so much wishful thinking." p. 321 show less

Dead Certainties is a bit of a strange book. Simon Schama combines two stories within it: one called The Many Deaths of General Wolfe recounts Wolfe"s demise in battle, and then looks at the mythologising that followed it, in the forms of Benjamin West's famous painting, and the history of Francis Parkman.

The second story, called Death of a Harvard Man, occupies most of the book. It concerns the disappearance and murder of noted Boston capitalist George Parkman (an antecedent of Francis Parkman's) and the subsequent sensational trial of Harvard Professor John Webster for the crime. Schama's somewhat fictionalised account is an engrossing retelling of a quite gruesone and scandalous affair.

I found it a struggle to grasp the point that show more Schama was trying to make in combining these two stories. Despite both a Foreword and an Afterword where Schama tries to explain his idea, I can only see the most tenuous connection between the two, and would have enjoyed the book just as much - if not more - if Schama focused solely on the story of the Webster trial, and left Wolfe out of it. show less

Schama takes a somewhat unusual approach for a historian in this book. Rather than strictly attributable history, every fact footnoted and cited, here he takes primary and secondary sources (the “Dead Certainties” of the title) and uses them to spin a more accessible, but nonverifiable story, placing ideas, feelings, and motives into the forms of the historical actors (the “Unwarranted Speculations”).

The result is a very readable set of stories, the first dealing with the death of the British General Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham during the successful defeat of the French army; the second relating the murder of a medical-doctor-cum-landlord by a Harvard chemistry professor in the 1840s. The tales are linked by the Parkman show more family—George Parkman is the murder victim in the latter portion of the book; his nephew, Francis Parkman, was a famous historian responsible for excellent work on the French and Indian War. show less

"First, there are the two intriguing stories... one about the triumph and death of James Wolfe at Quebec in 1759, the second an exploration of the murder of the Boston Brahmin George Parkman in 1849. But Schama is after bigger game, and his target is the gap between a 'lived event and its subsequent narration.'"

Intriguing little profiles of several key American deaths and how they've been used/viewed.

Simon Schama, author of [b:Citizens|706|The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book)|Jon Stewart|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1157224104s/706.jpg|1589081] (a history of the French revolution) and [b:Embarrassment of Riches|21073|The Embarrassment of Riches An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age|Simon Schama|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167301809s/21073.jpg|965311] (a cultural history of the Dutch), has authored a strange little book entitled Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations . I say strange, because while I've enjoyed it, I can't figure it out. Basically, he describes two historical events from several perspectives, and the link between the two is tenuous indeed. We begin with a fictional show more account of the death of Wolfe on the heights of Abraham in Quebec seen through the eyes of a soldier participating in the battle. Schama then proceeds to describe the accuracy of Benjamin West's famous painting of the event. This is followed by an essay on Francis Parkman, who, of course, is best known for his authoritative work on the [b:French in North America|329424|The French and Indian War Deciding the Fate of North America|Walter R. Borneman|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173800862s/329424.jpg|320023] and [b:The Oregon Trail|875643|Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie The Oregon Trail Diary of Hattie Campbell, 1847 (Dear America Series)|Kristiana Gregory|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179107337s/875643.jpg|1361733] Parkman insisted on authenticity for his works and, despite ill health, wandered over all the geography he wrote about; falling into swamps, scaling cliffs, and suffering attacks from hoards of black flies.

The second part of the book is about the murder of George Parkman, Francis' uncle, (this is the gossamer link) by John Webster. George disappeared one afternoon in 1849 while out walking. He was a respected member of the Harvard faculty, as was Webster, who had become well known for his research into more humane methods of institutionalizing the mentally ill. Webster, professor of Chemistry at Harvard, was up to his eyeballs in debt, and it was discovered that he had borrowed money from Parkman and Robert Gould Shaw (uncle to the hero of the movie Glory) using his quite valuable and geologically significant collection of rocks as collateral for both. It was also learned that Parkman was very perturbed by this double use of the collateral and was demanding his money back. Schama then provides a detailed account of the investigation and trial, which became a Boston media event. Ultimately, I suppose, the book is a meditation on distinction between truth and reality. Does art constitute reality? Does literature/fiction recreate history? Does Francis Parkman have a lock on the truth? show less

Schama is always wonderful