Francis Parkman

(1823 - 1893)

While attending Harvard University in the 1840s, the historian Francis Parkman journeyed through New England and southeastern Canada, concluding that pretty girls and horses were “the ‘first-ratest’ things in nature.” In 1892 he published the seventh and last volume of his grand history, France and England in North America, which covered the colonial period from its earliest beginnings up to 1763.