Word: parkman
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...Francis Parkman; Library of America; 2 volumes; 3,124 pages...
This was the method pursued by Francis Parkman (1823-93), a wealthy and well-bred Bostonian who entered Harvard in 1840 and began experiencing what he called "symptoms of 'Injuns' on the brain." These soon led to an ambitious disease; the undergraduate decided to write the history of "the whole course of the American conflict between France and England." This task, which lasted his lifetime, was fulfilled in seven books that were published between...
...Parkman's own labors seemed as heroic as the scope of his subject. He learned to shoot, ride a horse and maneuver a canoe, essential skills for the thousands of miles of travel that lay ahead. Mountains of old documents rose to test his fortitude. He fell victim to a variety of physical and nervous disorders. In the preface to an early volume, he mentions a vision problem that "has never permitted reading or writing continuously for much more than five minutes, and often has not permitted them at all." Somehow, he soldiered...
...Parkman's strained, beleaguered life produced a stunning epic, stretching from French explorations during the latter years of the 15th century to the signing in 1763 of the Peace of Paris, in which France effectively relinquished all claims to the North American continent. Through it all, the historian occupies stage center, an entertaining, indispensable and highly opinionated witness...
...Beacon Street, designed by Edward Clarke Cabot in 1846, provided sunny halls where Brahmins could read (or snooze) and scholars could work. The Athenaeum's roster of readers over the years is a Who's Who of American writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Francis Parkman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Eliot Morison, Robert Lowell...