Simon Schama's Dead Certainties

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 tha

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y of the same pesky critters that caused so much disease among the troops. Here, Parkman was perhaps surprised to learn, there was much less than met the eye. In his wanderings looking for confirmation of his notion of the heroic American landscape, not only at the battle site but also in other parts of the country, Parkman ruined his health, a vicious irony for a member of the privileged Beacon Hill transcendental set. Parkman's achievement with regard to Wolfe as a subject of historical biography was to find in Wolfe what was in himself: an affinity with a body that betrayed him and a commitment to a certain duty to life. Or was it a duty to a certain way of death? For Parkman's very description of Wolfe makes a heroic virtue out of the necessity of dealing with the pesky critters. Schama may seem to well admire Parkman for becoming (in his writing) as one with Wolfe on account of the recognition of their shared physical frailty in a hostile environment, but in this very oneness, Parkman insists on Wolfe's overweening heroic sensibility of duty despite enormous odds (We'll win this battle, your majesty, no matter how tall that Pesky cliff is!). It is as if the writer of history cannot resist being tendentious, cannot resi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2343
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)