Read April 2014. ( )

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 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. ( )

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 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 ( )

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 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. ( )

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