Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.

Parkman made expeditions through the Alps and the Apennine mountains climbed Vesuvius and even lived for a time in Rome where he befriended Passionist monks who tried unsuccessfully to convert him to Catholicism. CXVIII No. Gallery


Selected works
The Oregon Trail (1847)
The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851)
Vassall Morton (1856) a novel
The Book of Roses (1866)
France and England in North America (1865-1892):
The Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)
The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867)
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869)
The Old Régime in Canada (1874)
Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877)
Montcalm and Wolfe (1884)
A Half Century of Conflict (1892)

The Journals of Francis Parkman.

(September 16 1823 – November 8 1893) was an American historian best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. He was also a leading horticulturist briefly a Professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and the first leader of the Arnold Arboretum and author of several books on the topic.