Francis Parkman - Legacy

Legacy

Parkman has been hailed as one of America's great historians and as a master of narrative history. His work has been praised by historians who have published essays in new editions of his work, including Pulitzer Prize winners C. Vann Woodward, Allan Nevins and Samuel Eliot Morison, along with Wilbur R. Jacobs, John Keegan, William Taylor, Mark Van Doren, David Levin, among others. Famous artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Frederic Remington have illustrated Parkman's books. Numerous translations have spread the books around the world.

Parkman's biases, particularly his attitudes about nationality, race, and especially Native Americans, have generated criticism. As C. Vann Woodward wrote in 1984:

Too often Parkman could ignore evidence that was not in accord with his views, permit his bias to control his judgment, or sketch characterizations that are little better than hostile caricatures.... Modern sensibilities will be nettled by his casual stereotypes of national character and by the sharp distinction he draws between "civilization" and "savagery." Even more difficult to take is his portrayal (not always consistent or invariably negative) of the Indian as a beast of the forest, "man, wolf, and devil, all in one," and as a race inevitably and rightly doomed.

The English-born and Sorbonne-educated Canadian historian W. J. Eccles harshly criticized what he perceived as Parkman's bias against France and Roman Catholic policies, as well as what he considered Parkman's misuse of French language sources. Noted Eccles, "Francis Parkman's epic work La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Boston, 1869) is doubtless a great literary work, but, as history, it is, to say the least of dubious merit." However, Parkman's most severe detractor was the American historian Francis Jennings, an outspoken and controversial critic of the European colonization of North America, who went so far as to characterize Parkman's work as "fiction" and Parkman himself as a "liar".

Unlike Jennings and Eccles, many modern historians have found much to praise in Parkman's work, even while recognizing his limitations. Calling Jennings' critique "vitriolic and unfair," the historian Robert S. Allen has said that Parkman's history of France and England in North America "remains a rich mixture of history and literature which few contemporary scholars can hope to emulate". The historian Michael N. McConnell, while acknowledging the historical errors and racial prejudice in Parkman's book The Conspiracy of Pontiac, has said:

...it would be easy to dismiss Pontiac as a curious—perhaps embarrassing—artifact of another time and place. Yet Parkman's work represents a pioneering effort; in several ways he anticipated the kind of frontier history now taken for granted.... Parkman's masterful and evocative use of language remains his most enduring and instructive legacy.

The American writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson (1894–1972) in his book O Canada (1965), described Parkman’s France and England in North America in these terms: “The clarity, the momentum and the color of the first volumes of Parkman’s narrative are among the most brilliant achievements of the writing of history as an art.”

The Francis Parkman School in Forest Hills bears his name, as does Parkman Drive and the granite Francis Parkman Memorial at the site of his last home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. On September 16, 1967, the United States Postal Service honored Parkman with a Prominent Americans series 3¢ postage stamp.