Francis Parkman, Jr. (September 16, 1823 – November 8, 1893) was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a Professor of Horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic....

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. “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...

The classic account of one man's journey into the wild American frontier. In the spring of 1846, Francis Parkman, a Harvard-educated Boston-born aristocrat, headed west to experience the untamed regions of America, to acquaint himself with the wild mountain men in the Rockies, and to visit the surviving Indian tribes before all were absorbed by the relentless advance of Western civilization. Only twenty-two years old, Parkman had been preparing for...

Louis-Joseph de Montcalm (1712-1759) was the French commander in Canada during the Seven Years' War with England (also called the French and Indian War). James Wolfe (1727-1759) was the opposing British general who won the conflict. This vivid history of their clash is the final volume of Francis Parkman's seven-volume France and England in North America.

Historian, critic, and horticulturist Francis Parkman was renowned for his analytical acuity and narrative skill. In “A Half Century of Conflict: France and England in North America, Volume 1”, Parkman dissects and explains the tumult that surrounded the birth of the United States. This book is regarded as one of the highest literary achievements in nineteenth-century historical writing.