The sensation of the summer season—at least among historians—has undoubtedly been the appearance of Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations).1 Readers had come to expect from this Mellon Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard the writing of rather conventional, even massively detailed and documented histories like his Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1977) and The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987). But in this current study Schama has given us a radically different kind of book—and has set the discipline of history abuzzing.
Coherence and persuasion are out.
Dead Certainties brings together several historical episodes, having an ambiguous logical connection, in order to illustrate some generalizations about historiography as such. There are several accounts of the death in battle of General James Wolfe, who led the victorious British forces against Quebec in 1759 and so forced the French out of North America. (The story of his death—as well as that of his antagonist Montcalm, who also died in the battle—is responsibly told in Francis Parkman’s superb history Montcalm and Wolfe [1884].) Schama goes on to provide an account of Benjamin West’s painting The Death of General Wolfe(1770), which idealized the heroic British commander, took London by storm, and assured West’s artistic fame. We are also presented a wholly invented diary entry of a British common soldier, who is imagined to have been present at the battle where Wolfe fell. And finally, among other things, Schama gives
