30: 8. Monuments, Darkness, and Contingency Professor Robert G. Parkinson, Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier This section highlights the enduring conflict, which extended into the early 20th century through a "monument
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John Batchelor
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🗓️ 27 October 2025
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Summary
This section highlights the enduring conflict, which extended into the early 20th century through a "monument war" near Logan's Elm in Ohio. The Cresap Society funded a monument to clear their family name, leading locals to erect counter-monuments with the lament's text and a statue of Logan. Parkinson utilizes Joseph Conrad's metaphor of "the flicker" (human systems like patriotism, colonialism, and republics) attempting to illuminate the terrifying, bewildering "darkness" of the world. He notes that the aggressive colonial expansion seemed inevitable, but the specific outcomes were shaped by contingency and the biographies of individuals like Logan and Michael Cresap, whose actions were enabled and celebrated by the new American Republic.
1958
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchew with Professor Rob Parkinson. His book is Heart of American Darkness, |
| 0:05.0 | Bewilderment and Horror on the early frontier. We fought the French and Indian wars, three of them. |
| 0:10.0 | We fought the American Revolution. We certainly have survived through the war of 1812. |
| 0:16.0 | McGuffie's reader into the 1840s, 1850s. I've got one. I sent away for one. And the school children across |
| 0:23.6 | America are learning Logan's Lament. However, that does not satisfy the battling families, the |
| 0:31.4 | Crescips in particular. There's a tree called Logan's Tree. Where is it? It is just outside of Circleville, Ohio today. |
| 0:40.3 | And under that tree, there are ceremonies. |
| 0:44.3 | There are also battling monuments. |
| 0:46.3 | I lost track of how many monuments. |
| 0:48.3 | It was like you put up a monument and it's like a monument war. |
| 0:52.3 | We put up a monument. |
| 0:53.3 | It is. There's four there. There are We put up a monument. It is. The original... |
| 0:55.0 | There's four there. |
| 0:56.0 | There are four of them. One of them is the tall mingo chieftain. |
| 1:00.0 | And the families are still not satisfied. What is it that they want? |
| 1:04.0 | What will end this dispute that's beyond the grave? |
| 1:08.0 | Well, so they're trying to... |
| 1:10.0 | So what Luther Martin tries to do with newspapers and print |
| 1:14.9 | is to try to clear the Crescent name. |
| 1:16.9 | And that doesn't really work because of this sort of tide of popularity with a lament. |
| 1:25.6 | And so by the end of the 19th century, 1880s and 90s, |
| 1:30.3 | Americans go on this bender about remembering their past, right? |
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