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Dead Certainties

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A few years ago, I became a professional social scientist. As such, I became tangled in the beginning...what is truth? I never figured it out, but I had to go to work and earn a living so I took up the viewpoint that seemed most reasonable --material empiricism -- and began documenting my version of truth and getting it published.

In DEAD CERTAINTIES (UNWARRENTED SPECULATION), Simon Schama raises important questions about the truth of history. How do historians know what really happened? Well the truth is, they don't. At best, our reconstructions of the past are partial truths. They are partial truths because no one is free from prejudice. They are partial truths, because try as we might to be objective, we cannot help but place our own interpretation on "facts." They are partial truths because eye witnesses to history seldom know all the "facts." They are partial truths because language is alive and word meanings change over time. And, they are partial truths because eye witnesses often lie.

What really happened in the past times? In recent years, new historical practicioners have begun to revisit primary materials and attempt to piece together their version of what these documents tell them. This revisionist history has it's supporters, but in the end, who is to say their interpretations are free of bias and agenda?

In DEAD CERTAINTIES Schama revisits the story of Wolfe the British hero of the 1700's on the 'Heights of Abraham' in Canada. Probably every Canadian school child of my generation, plus a few Americans, remembers the words, "Wolfe the dauntless hero came and planted firm Britannia's flag on Canada's fair domain." I don't know if it's still politically correct to sing these words in Canada, but I believe at one time they were the words to the national anthem.

Everyone who's ever taken a course in art has probably seen a photograph of Benjamin West's monumental painting "The Death of General Wolfe." It is a magnificent painting of a beautiful young man in the last agony of life, looking toward a distant and dramatic horizon. The painting has inspired generations of Canadians to national patriotism. The painting supposedly depicts the last hour of General Wolfe. Schama says, "Not so fast." He then goes on to tell as best he can given the material at hand, what he believes happened on that fateful day when General Wolfe met his maker (maybe he did, maybe he didn't).

The book also contains a second "story" about a murder that took place in New England in the last century. This "story" reads like a detective fiction. Schama demonstrates though his own research who he thinks the real killer was. It is an excellent read even if you don't like history.

This book sheds a little light on historiography--how historians have framed history in the past and how they go about it today. The book should be required reading for anyone who wants to know more about history and how it is written.

Simon Schama is a historian who is not afraid to acknowledge that history has a literary dimension. In "Dead Certainties", he tells a fascinating story in a style more familiar from historical novels, especially historical mysteries like "The Plague Tales" and "An Instance of the Fingerpost". But while you can read the book strictly for enjoyment, as if it were a novel, Schama has a serious point to make by writing in this accessible style. That point is that historical events are often highly ambiguous; that the records of the past that survive are often contradictory, and that writing history requires historians to provide the continuity by interpreting the past. It helps that the stories he uses for this demonstration are grisly: the deaths of General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759, and the murder in 1849 of George Parkman, a very unusual member of Boston society, by a Harvard professor at the end of his financial and professional rope. Dramatic deaths beg to be explained, to be made to make sense, even though they may not be evidence of great causes, but simply the results of strings of chance. Ultimately, Schama wants readers to remember even when they are reading the most prosaic and authoritative histories that someone had to decide which facts counted, what they meant, and which sets of facts go together to explain the past. Once you read this book, you should never look at histories in the same way again.

Simon Schama's "Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)" is an interesting foray into the murky realm of historiography. The book is comprised of two "tales:" that of General James Wolfe who (purportedly) meets his end at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and that of George Parkman, a Harvard Professor who met a grisly end in 1849 - which Schama treats as an historical "murder mystery."

Critics of this work charge that Schama has engaged in historical chicanery by incorporating fiction into both accounts and has, thus, mucked up the waters of what is a proper "history." To this, Schama admits so much in his text and also admits to that being his point.

What is interesting is Schama's attempt to stake out a dividing line between what is "historical fact" and what is "historical fiction" and in so doing, obliterate that line. After all, historical fiction is based upon "historical fact" and many historians have written histories based upon "historical fact" that were modified or even overturned after those "historical facts" were proven to be inventions of fiction.

We have a certain reliance on a consistent historical past "reality" or else we run into an Orwellian 1984 reality of a constantly changing historical past. Yet, we can never be quite certain of the "facts" that make up our histories and as Schama puts it:

"... historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness, however thorough or revealing their documentation. Of course they make do with other work: the business of formulating problems, of supplying explanations about cause and effect. But the certainty of such answers always remains contingent on their unavoidable remoteness from their subjects. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot." (p. 320)

"Dead Certainties" is an engaging and thoughtful piece of scholarship/literature that should be taken as such - and as such, it is not perfect.

Other reviews address the ways Schama deals with issues of truth, the boarder between history and fiction, and techniques of recreating the past in more vivid and personal ways. And as a book for stimulating discussion among historians and history buffs, Dead Certainties is an admirable work.

However, Schama seems also interested in writing narrative history for the sake of storytelling (and perhaps to reach a broader audience). As such, Dead Certainties has some serious flaws. The connections between the two sections of the book (the first quarter is about "The Many Deaths of General Wolfe" while the second is about a murder of a prominent Boston man a century later) are almost nonexistent, and the first story simply lacks dramatic power. Schama also fails to situate the narratives into any broader history; he does little convince the reader that his stories matter, even if they (or the second, murder mystery story, at least) are good reads.

There is plenty of food for thought, but the result of Schama's experiment is something not quite interesting and tightly constructed enough to compete to real historical fiction, and not quite trustworthy enough to be considered real history.

This book explores the boundary between recounting the past and creating the past. The writing is beautiful, the ideas are well-delineated, and the examples are compelling. The book chews over common themes in historigraphy, but thus author makes them accessible to the general public. Wonderfully written and unforgettable, this book will certainly give you food for thought. And it will make a better reader of straight history.

This was most likely a failed attempt at selling some more copies. Being a student of history myself I understand the "truth" that historians do not know exactly what happened in the past. They do, however, attempt to reconstruct the events in the past and offer some explanation as to why they happened and how they affect us today.

Schama does none of the above. Without any footnotes or sources to go by one cannot trace Scahma's logic and reasoning. Nor can one draw their own conclusions from the documents Schama uses because they simply aren't there. By this I mean he adds a note at the end saying, more or less, "screw you" to anyone that wants to follow his work.

If one is looking for a good read on the French and Indian War checkout Fowler's "Empires at War". In the end Schama's book is perfectly titled "Unwarranted Speculations" indeed.

If you are interested in the ongoing discourse of historians regarding a knowable or true past, Schama's work will certainly inspire lively discussions. What you will not find here is "history" by any standard definition of the subject. Schama uses two historical events -- the battle of Quebec and the murder trial of Dr. John Webster-- as case studies for an exploration of the boundaries between truth and fiction in historiography. Essentially, a great example of how NOT to write history.