Annette Gordon-Reed
"In the American imagination, the idea of the frontier looms large as the prime shaper of our nation’s character. But what actually happened on the frontier, and what does it say about the substance of American character? Robert G. Parkinson’s Heart of American Darkness is a brilliant meditation on those questions. The book presents the often-brutal reality of life on the frontier through the eyes of Indigenous people and the Europeans whom they encountered in the forests and on the rivers of the Ohio River Valley region, the early frontier. This book is a vital contribution to our understanding of our country’s beginnings and who we are."
Michael J. Witgen
"The Heart of American Darkness traces the struggle to control the trans-Appalachian west, as European empires and later the American Republic fought to wrest control of this region from its Indigenous inhabitants. Chronicling the violence and chaos that defined this contest over the ‘back country,’ Robert Parkinson provides a bold new interpretation of the founding history of the United States."
Greg Grandin
"The title of Robert Parkinson’s Heart of American Darkness invokes Joseph Conrad, but I also hear strong echoes of Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy in this searing account of the American frontier. Parkinson’s anti-epic is at once detailed and sweeping, a much-needed new national origins story, a tale where the bloody chaos of the past matches the bloody chaos of the present. An indispensable book."
Karl Jacoby
"Robert Parkinson’s gripping and memorable Heart of American Darkness provides a haunting portrait of the chaos, confusion, and shifting allegiances that swirled around the complex series of events that we now call the American Revolution."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-03-18
A scarifying, blood-soaked portrait of savagery on the early frontier—much of it committed by European settlers.
Parkinson, a historian of the American Revolution and the author of Thirteen Clocks, is a careful reader of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which, as the title suggests, he transposes to the mid-Appalachian frontier. There, Conrad’s vision of heads impaled on stakes and relentless massacres would slot in neatly as a study in terrors committed out of sheer greed. The Kurtz of the piece is a settler named Thomas Cresap, who lured a family of Mingo men, women, and children to a meadow alongside the upper reaches of the Potomac River and murdered them. Doing so made Cresap a sort of colonial folk hero, but it entangled him and his family with the families of his victims for decades and led to his being called out explicitly in a famed piece of Indigenous oratory known as “Logan’s Lament.” If Cresap, who “would later be nicknamed the Maryland Monster,” stands at the dark center of the Appalachian colonial universe, Parkinson’s story extends to include dozens of people drawn into the fight, from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to British generals Thomas Gage and Edward Braddock. The author also uncovers little-known moments in colonial history: a proto-civil war, for instance, between residents of Delaware and Pennsylvania, and a horrific episode in which Indigenous allies of the French captured one loyal to the British and “killed, boiled, and ate him.” Parkinson’s players, Native and European alike, are “bewildered,” the ground constantly shifting under their feet, alliances forming and crumbling, friends indistinguishable from foes. In the fog, other slaughters followed—and in them, intriguingly, Parkinson locates the first glimmer of the colonists’ decision to shake off British rule by force.
A superb addition to the history of the late colonial era and Revolution.
