The purpose of this research is to examine Simon Schama's Dead Certainties. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal theme of the book in broad outline, and then to discuss its strengths as a literary work as well as weaknesses as a source of microhistory.
Dead Certainties is a book that is an account of several accounts of two events of minor history, linked together by a family that gives one of the first event's accounts and that is the subject of the second event's accounts. If that account of the pattern of ideas set forth in the book is slightly bewildering, it is on account of the conceit of the work, which is that how we who read accounts of history think of historical events is of more account than the events themselves. In other words, the account of an event overtakes the facts of the event itself. Why this is so, or more exactly in what various ways this is probably so, is really the means by which the pattern of ideas in the work becomes clear.
Schama selects two deaths, of General James Wolfe in a battle of the French and Indian War, and of George Parkman, a member of Boston's first families, as his starting point. In telling, then retelling, the facts and circumstances of each case from various points of view, Schama suggests the moral, psychological, and psychosocial environment in which events unfolded and in which ways of remembering those events emerged. He also offers a way of retrieving what is important about those events that is consistent with the present's way of uncovering and understanding the past. This is the greatest strength of the book as a literary experiment. Indeed, Dead Certainties makes use of the devices of literary characterization to suggest the psychological truth of the milieu in which the deaths occurred.
In respect of the death of Wolfe, Schama provides a succession of interpretations of an event that are rendered with the absolute assurance that only th...