July 11, 2003

History or Fiction?

By LOUIS P. MASUR

In 1991, the historian Simon Schama published a book that stirred great controversy among scholars. Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) consisted of two parts. The first, "The Many Deaths of General Wolfe," examined various accounts of the death of British Gen. James Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec in 1759. The second, "Death of a Harvard Man," probed the 1850 trial of John White Webster, a Harvard chemistry professor, for the murder of George Parkman, a physician turned affluent

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