Dead Certainties (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Simon Schama
- First Published: 1991
- Type of Work: History
- Time of Work: The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- Setting: Quebec, Canada; London; Boston
- Principal Characters: James Wolfe, Benjamin West, Francis Parkman, George Parkman, John Webster, Lemuel Shaw
- Genres: Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: Memory, Murder or homicide, Nineteenth century, New England, Violence, War, Eighteenth century, Criticism, Death or dying, Canada or Canadians, Symbolism, London
- Locales: Boston, MA, London, England, Quebec, Canada
Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties is an essay on the limitations of history. Such a work from this author demands attention, for Schama is a distinguished historian who has written best-selling histories of the Netherlands of the seventeenth century (The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, 1987) and the French Revolution (Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, 1989). In Dead Certainties, though he deals with historical subjects, Schama eschews the traditional scholarly apparatus and tells his stories from a...
[The entire page is 2347 words long]
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