January 2011

The current Soviet “line” on the purchase of Alaska is essentially a reflection of Stalinist chauvinism, introduced into Soviet historiography in the mid-1930’s and carried to absurd heights in the period immediately following World War II. Thus, the article on Alaska in Volume II of the most recent edition of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia (1950) goes to great pains to praise Russian scientists and explorers for being the “first” to “study and familiarize themselves” with the geography, climate, and flora and fauna of the North Pacific, and laud the Russian-American Company for having raised “the cultural level of the indigenous population of ‘Russian America.’” This last flies squarely in the face of a Russian admission—by Minister to Washington Edouard de Stoeckl, in an 1867 letter to the Russian chancellery—that “The situation of the Indians of the [Aleutian] islands under our domination has not been improved either physically or morally, and the tribes of the mainland have continued to be as savage and as hostile as they were at the time of the discovery.”

Defeating the Enemy Deep-Diving Whale From the Frontier

One of the benefits that come from the study of history, which after all is nothing more than the examination of assorted human lives, is the recurrent discovery that the human spirit is basically unconquerable. This is revealed in big ways and in little ways—in the story of a nation, and in the story of a single individual—and wherever it is met it is like a bright light glowing in the dark. Simple strength of will can win over the longest odds. Wish hard enough and what you wish for can come true. Possibly the moral, if a moral must be looked for, is that the dreams we serve had better be lofty; some day they may turn into realities.

The fields of the historian and the novelist do overlap. In a sense, Parkman had the novelist’s talents —imagination, understanding, a feeling for literary form, a curiosity about the ultimate meaning of the things men do. And Herman Melville, one of America’s greatest novelists, had something of the historian in him, too, which is to say that he wanted to get at the truth of things. Moby Dick remains to this day about as good a history of the old American whaling industry as we are likely to need, and for all of his transcendentalism and his soaring flights of fancy, Melville had all of Parkman’s reverence for hard facts.

Melville revealed himself in his letters, too, and it is worthwhile to let him speak for himself just after listening to Parkman. The Letters of Herman Melville , edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Oilman, offers an excellent opportunity to do this. Hear Melville, as he writes to Richard Henry Dana while in the midst of the composition of Moby Dick :

For slavery was a holdover from the old colonial era, and in the increasingly mechanized, highly organized world of the mid-nineteenth century it could survive only by mutual consent. As Mr. Dumond remarks, “Few … institutions were ever so dependent as slavery upon tranquillity.” When the guns opened on Fort Sumter America’s tranquillity was violently shattered, and the conditions under which slavery could live no longer existed. Perhaps the real depth of the tragedy which followed lies in the fact that the nation destroyed slavery without first discarding the belief in racial inequality.

I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnissy, because it aint like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me the people fightin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ married, owin’ the groceryman an’ bein’ without hard coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure. Historyans is like doctors. They are always lookin’ f’r symptoms. Those av thim that writes about their own times examines th’ tongue an’ feels th’ pulse an’ makes a wrong diagnosis. Th’ other kind iv histhry is a post-mortem examination. It tells ye what a counthry died iv. But I’d like to know what it lived iv.

—Finley Peter Dunne’s “Mr. Dooley”

Aristotle and Pandora The Basis for Slavery Who Is Superior?