In the third installment of our preview of the new (Winter) issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here), Algis Valiunas takes up Francis Parkman’s monumental history of the settling of North America and the contest between France and England for control. Parkman’s work has itself receded into history that exists only to be renounced and condemned. In the review/essay “Battle for a continent,” Algis declines to subscribe to the new orthodoxy:
To establish civilization in the North American wilderness required heroic energy, courage, sacrifice, and dauntlessness, from both ordinary and extraordinary men and women. The annals of discovery, exploration, settlement, and conquest recount prodigies of boldness and perseverance that the comfortable modern reader can scarcely imagine.
Americans used to take pride in the achievements of those forebears, who made possible the sweet, comfortable, civilized life most of us enjoy. Such pride has of course become unfashionable, not to say “racist.” The ugliness in America’s origins, and our complicity as the beneficiaries of the ancestral crimes, is all we are allowed to see of our beginnings; and we are admonished to be appropriately horrified and revolted. Now that the wilderness has itself become holy—for many, the last sanctuary of holiness—the fact that large cities and their suburbs sprawl where primeval forest or drear desert once stood is desecration. And with the destruction of the wilderness came the dispossession of the land’s rightful possessors, in the perfection of their Neolithic innocence: the indigenous peoples who would have lived in peace, but were defeated in unjust, even genocidal war.
All nations’ origins have their ugliness, and it is right that the truth be told. Without candor and a sense of proportion, however, the whole truth about the encounter of civilization with barbarism in North America has degenerated into a Hollywood fantasy of unforgivable evildoing on the part of white invaders who, professing to bring salvation to savagery, had proved to be themselves the real savages.
A corrective to this woke narrative can be found in the writings of Francis Parkman (1823–1893), the supreme historian of that fateful encounter, which was really a world-historical collision….
If you are a fan of Parkman, of American history, or of good writing, Algis’s essay will make for pleasure reading.
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