Francis Parkman

Working from firsthand sources-and through the bias and prejudices of his time-noted American historian and writer Francis Parkman produced, in 1867, this prodigious history of the Jesuit priesthood in North America during the early decades With reports, memoirs, journals, letters, and other papers both official and private serving as his background, Parkman details the Catholics' attempts to convert the Huron, Algonquin, and Iroquois, as well as the resulting Iroquois war on the con FRANCIS PARKMAN (1823-1893) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a wealthy family whose fortune allowed him the freedom to pursue his twin scholarly passions of horticulture and history. A founder of the Archaeological Institute of America, he authore

In Montcalm and Wolfe, Francis Parkman presents a majestic and panoramic history of the French and Indian Wars in North America. Against a backdrop of the world's first truly global conflict, the Seven Years War, Parkman explores the personal duel for supremacy between Britain's James Wolfe and France's Louis de Montcalm. The outcome of this conflict did indeed decisively shape the future of a continent.

The Oregon Trail offers a critical view of the Conestoga wagon generation. The result of the notes Parkman took along the newly-developed roads to the West, the book put an end to the sentimentalized portrait of pioneer travel. Altering the course of American history and shaping early views of Native Americans, it denounces, in its descriptions of the Oglala tribe he visited, the stereotype of the Noble Savage.