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The John Batchelor Show

4/8: Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier Hardcover – by Robert G. Parkinson (Author)

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

News, Books, Society & Culture, Arts

4.62.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

4/8: Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier Hardcover – by  Robert G. Parkinson  (Author)

https://www.amazon.com/Heart-American-Darkness-Bewilderment-Frontier/dp/1324091770

We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? In this startingly original work, historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skillfully on Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as the European colonization of Africa, which Conrad knew firsthand and fictionalized in his masterwork.

At the center of Parkinson’s story are two families whose entwined histories ended in tragedy. The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. Together, the families helped determine the fate of the British and French empires, which were battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. From the Seven Years’ War to the protests over the Stamp Act to the start of the Revolutionary War, Parkinson recounts the major turning points of the era from a vantage that allows us to see them anew, and to perceive how bewildering they were to people at the time.

For the Shickellamy family, it all came to an end on April 30, 1774, when most of the clan were brutally murdered by white settlers associated with the Cresaps at a place called Yellow Creek. That horrific event became news all over the continent, and it led to war in the interior, at the very moment the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Michael Cresap, at first blamed for the massacre at Yellow Creek, would be transformed by the Revolution into a hero alongside George Washington. In death, he helped cement the pioneer myth at the heart of the new republic.

Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today.

42 illustrations

1789 American map Ohio River

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm John Baxter and I've insisted on telling you this is so much more complicated than the Colonials versus the Royal Navy.

0:09.0

We have Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia in one contest, the Mingoes, the Shawnees, the Delaware's in another contest,

0:17.0

and the British and the American Colonials in another contest.

0:21.6

And then we have the colonials who are not quite sure which side they're on.

0:24.6

Nobody is. Rob makes the point again and again.

0:27.6

What happened when they heard about the Continental Congress in 74 and the one in 75?

0:33.6

And Bunkers Hill, everybody said, what's in it for me?

0:36.6

Did I get that right, Rob? What's in it for me? Did I get that right, Rob?

0:38.2

What's in it for me?

0:39.4

You got that right.

0:40.4

It's another layer of bewilderment that now extends over the older colonial fights about these things.

0:48.0

And so everyone has to all of a sudden choose, again, which tribe they want to support.

0:54.1

And we come now to what is known as Bunkers Hill, which is in fact Brees Hill.

0:59.0

I hope you all know that I'm not going to have time to tell that story.

1:02.0

But in any event, the word goes out from Congress, which is now in Philadelphia, moving south,

1:08.0

away from the British, that they need volunteers, especially from

1:13.0

Pennsylvania. I'm not sure whether these are Virginians or Pennsylvanes, but they pass as

1:18.3

riflemen. What kind of volunteers? And what happens with Michael Cressip, Rob?

1:23.5

Right. So the important thing to know is Logan is not the only one that blames Michael Cressup for what happens, the Yellow Creek and then the subsequent war with between Virginia and the Shawnee that develops over the course of late summer and fall after that. There are a number of people who send messages to newspapers in Philadelphia and New York

1:48.0

especially who are saying that Michael Crescent is the reason for all this. And there are a number of

1:52.9

British officials who think that he is the reason that all this nonsense has happened, this

1:59.5

really sort of horrific violence that begins, I shouldn't

...

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