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Francis Parkman: France and England in North America (two volumes)

Edited by David Levin

“A panorama that never dwarfs personalities—a demonstration of historical process that is, at the same time, deeply attentive to the human concerns that shaped it.” — The Christian Science Monitor

Overview

Overview

These two Library of America volumes brings together, for the first time in compact form, all seven titles of Francis Parkman’s monumental account of France and England’s imperial struggle for dominance on the North American continent.

Parkman conceived the project in 1841, when he was a Harvard sophomore, and persisted in it despite chronic disorders that affected his eyes. The last volume of what he called his “history of the American forest” appeared almost thirty years after the first. Deservedly compared as a literary achievement to Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Parkman’s accomplishment is hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes. His own indomitable spirit is reflected in two of the history’s most fiercely resolute figures: La Salle, obsessed with colonizing the Mississippi Valley, and Frontenac, determined to bolster France’s tottering position in the New World. He tells a story of great empires maneuvering in an unfamiliar and hostile terrain with all the guile, sophistication, and ingenuity learned from centuries of European rivalry.

Parkman’s chronicle of nearly two and a half centuries of conflict permanently transforms the modern image of the American landscape. Written with verve, suppleness, and wit, this grand narrative history of political and theological conflict, of feats of physical endurance, of courtly manners practiced with comic disproportion against the backdrop of a looming wilderness, is itself one of the still-undiscovered treasures of our national and of world literature.

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3124 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

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Francis Parkman: France and England in North America (two volumes)

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