Status
Available
Call number
Publication
New York : Vintage Books, 1999.
Description
Winner of the Bancroft Prize King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war--colonists against Indians--that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war." The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war--and because of it--that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indians and Anglos. Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves. Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society… (more)
Media reviews
In King Philip's War of 1675, Algonquian Indians decimated more than half of the towns in New England, while the British massacred Indian settlements and shipped thousands of Algonquians out of the colonies as slaves. Though academic in style, this engrossing study by a Boston University history
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professor sheds new light on what is widely considered the most brutal and vicious war in American history... This study is full of valuable material on early English-Native contacts, on the widespread sale of Indians into foreign slavery and on relations between England and the elite of Christian Indians who mistakenly believed they would be spared from slavery. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member cao9415
On its' face, The Name of War appears to be a work of military history. It is not. Instead of merely examining battles and leaders, it examines far more. Jill Lepore, a professor of history at Boston University, instead examines the more abstract implications of the war. Beginning with the actual
King Philip's War was the seminal event in New England during the 1670s. Though it only lasted for about two years, it was the bloodiest war in American history (xi). And, more than any other conflict, it can be argued that it had an impact upon America and Americans' view of themselves that outlived even America's memory of the conflict as it served as the template for almost all of the later Indian conflicts (xiii).
According to Lepore, the Algonquian Indians were at a literal disadvantage in their struggle against the New Englanders; they failed to utilize language (26-27). Though many of the Indians were literate, no surviving account of the war from the Indians' perspective exists; one was not even created. Why did they fail to record their grievances, their concerns, and their reasons for war? Lepore argues that literacy had dangerous cultural implications for Indians. Those who became literate did so as part of a process of assimilation into the English-speaking world (27); their loyalties were thus split between the old and the new. It can be argued that becoming literate could be very dangerous for an Indian; in some instances, literacy could be lethal.
Fighting in such a brutal war inflicted great damage upon colonists' view of themselves as civilized, God-fearing people. Lepore argues that the New Englanders used their near monopoly of language and the printed word to explain the conflict in such a way as to reconcile its' events with their cherished image of themselves. This meant that the actions of the Indians was attributed to their uncivilized savagery, while their own actions became the measured and necessary response necessary to defend themselves and their God against their blasphemous enemies (119). The colonists' actions were a just response to the Indians' treachery.
Since only settlers recorded the history of the war, the memory of that conflict necessarily represented only their viewpoint. From there, the memory entered the collective consciousness of America. It became an allegory for the justness of the American cause during the Revolution (186), and later an integral symbol of a singularly American event, with King Philip becoming the archetypal American (194, 197).
Lepore does a fine job examining King Philip's War in a unique fashion, demonstrating how a war is remembered and how brutality may be justified. She uses a wide variety of sources to make her case: newspapers, books, journals, and letters. Even plays and short stories are used to demonstrate how a collective memory is developed and used. Lepore makes effective use of her sources to tell her story. An examination of the endnotes shows that no relevant source was ignored.
Lepore has effectively provided a rich picture of the settlers' view of themselves, and how they used their 'literal advantage' to shape public perception of the war. The only thing missing from this discussion is the Indians' response; however, we believe her—she convinces us—that their response is not just unavailable, but is nonexistent. This is—in and of itself—proof of her thesis. Lepore has provided, in a unique way, a picture of the horrors of war.
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name of the war, she examines how language is used to describe the conflict, the role of religion and slavery, and, lastly, how the collective memory of the struggle was shaped. King Philip's War was the seminal event in New England during the 1670s. Though it only lasted for about two years, it was the bloodiest war in American history (xi). And, more than any other conflict, it can be argued that it had an impact upon America and Americans' view of themselves that outlived even America's memory of the conflict as it served as the template for almost all of the later Indian conflicts (xiii).
According to Lepore, the Algonquian Indians were at a literal disadvantage in their struggle against the New Englanders; they failed to utilize language (26-27). Though many of the Indians were literate, no surviving account of the war from the Indians' perspective exists; one was not even created. Why did they fail to record their grievances, their concerns, and their reasons for war? Lepore argues that literacy had dangerous cultural implications for Indians. Those who became literate did so as part of a process of assimilation into the English-speaking world (27); their loyalties were thus split between the old and the new. It can be argued that becoming literate could be very dangerous for an Indian; in some instances, literacy could be lethal.
Fighting in such a brutal war inflicted great damage upon colonists' view of themselves as civilized, God-fearing people. Lepore argues that the New Englanders used their near monopoly of language and the printed word to explain the conflict in such a way as to reconcile its' events with their cherished image of themselves. This meant that the actions of the Indians was attributed to their uncivilized savagery, while their own actions became the measured and necessary response necessary to defend themselves and their God against their blasphemous enemies (119). The colonists' actions were a just response to the Indians' treachery.
Since only settlers recorded the history of the war, the memory of that conflict necessarily represented only their viewpoint. From there, the memory entered the collective consciousness of America. It became an allegory for the justness of the American cause during the Revolution (186), and later an integral symbol of a singularly American event, with King Philip becoming the archetypal American (194, 197).
Lepore does a fine job examining King Philip's War in a unique fashion, demonstrating how a war is remembered and how brutality may be justified. She uses a wide variety of sources to make her case: newspapers, books, journals, and letters. Even plays and short stories are used to demonstrate how a collective memory is developed and used. Lepore makes effective use of her sources to tell her story. An examination of the endnotes shows that no relevant source was ignored.
Lepore has effectively provided a rich picture of the settlers' view of themselves, and how they used their 'literal advantage' to shape public perception of the war. The only thing missing from this discussion is the Indians' response; however, we believe her—she convinces us—that their response is not just unavailable, but is nonexistent. This is—in and of itself—proof of her thesis. Lepore has provided, in a unique way, a picture of the horrors of war.
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LibraryThing member DarthDeverell
In The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, Jill Lepore argues, “Wounds and words – the injuries and their interpretation – cannot be separated, that acts of war generate acts of narration, and that both types of acts are often joined in a common purpose:
Lepore writes, “Perhaps, the English New Englanders worried, they themselves were becoming Indianized, contaminated by the influence of America’s wilderness and its wild people. Meanwhile, many Algonquians had come to suspect the reverse, worrying that they themselves had become too much like their new European neighbors” (pg. 7). While Indians may have waged war to preserve their identity, the conflict also left those natives who could write among the first casualties. Lepore writes, “War is a contest of words as much as it is a contest of wounds. This connection, between waging war and writing about it, was not lost on New England’s colonists” (pg. 47). Further discussing identity, Lepore writes, “During the war it seemed to many colonists that all that had made them English and all that had made the land their own – their clothes, houses, barns, churches, cattle, and crops – were being threatened. For most colonists, the loss of habitations became the central crisis of the war” (pg. 77). She continues, “In the context of King Philip’s War, concerns about the boundaries of the body became overlaid onto concerns not only about the boundaries of English property but also about the cultural boundaries separating English from Indian” (pg. 82).
Lepore continues, “In every measurable way King Philip’s War was a harsher conflict than any Indian-English conflict that preceded it. It took place on a grander scale; it lasted longer; the methods both sides employed were more severe; and the language the English adopted to justify and document it was more dismissive of Indian culture – Indian religious beliefs; Indian warfare; Indian’s use of the land; and, ultimately, Indian sovereignty – than it had ever been before. In some important way King Philip’s War was a defining moment, when any lingering, though slight, possibility for Algonquian political and cultural autonomy was lost and when the English moved one giant step closer to the worldview that would create, a century and a half later, the Indian removal policy adopted by Andrew Jackson” (pg. 166-167). Further examining the legacy, Lepore writes, “For Cotton Mather, as for his father, King Philip’s War was a holy war, a war against barbarism, and a war that never really ended” (pg. 175). Lepore concludes, “No matter how much the colonists wrote about the war, no matter how much or how eloquently they justified their cause and conduct or vilified Philip, New England’s colonists could never succeed at reconstructing themselves as ‘true Englishmen.’ The danger of degenerating into Indians continued to haunt them” (pg. 175). Later, “clothed in revolutionary rhetoric, the memory of King Philip’s War was invoked to urge the colonists to free themselves from the ‘captivity’ they now suffered under British tyranny” (pg. 188).
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defining the geographical, political, cultural, and sometimes racial and national boundaries between peoples” (pg. x). She continues, “King Philip’s War was not, as some historians have suggested, the foundational American frontier experience or even the archetypal Indian war. Wars like it had been fought before, and every war brings its own stories, its own miseries. Yet there remains something about King Philip’s War that hints of allegory. In a sense, King Philip’s War never ended. In other times, in other places, its painful wounds would be reopened, its vicious words spoken again” (pg. xiii). Finally, “out of the chaos of war, English colonists constructed a language that proclaimed themselves to be neither cruel colonizers like the Spaniards nor savage natives like the Indians” (pg. xiv). In this way, identity plays a key role in Lepore’s study.Lepore writes, “Perhaps, the English New Englanders worried, they themselves were becoming Indianized, contaminated by the influence of America’s wilderness and its wild people. Meanwhile, many Algonquians had come to suspect the reverse, worrying that they themselves had become too much like their new European neighbors” (pg. 7). While Indians may have waged war to preserve their identity, the conflict also left those natives who could write among the first casualties. Lepore writes, “War is a contest of words as much as it is a contest of wounds. This connection, between waging war and writing about it, was not lost on New England’s colonists” (pg. 47). Further discussing identity, Lepore writes, “During the war it seemed to many colonists that all that had made them English and all that had made the land their own – their clothes, houses, barns, churches, cattle, and crops – were being threatened. For most colonists, the loss of habitations became the central crisis of the war” (pg. 77). She continues, “In the context of King Philip’s War, concerns about the boundaries of the body became overlaid onto concerns not only about the boundaries of English property but also about the cultural boundaries separating English from Indian” (pg. 82).
Lepore continues, “In every measurable way King Philip’s War was a harsher conflict than any Indian-English conflict that preceded it. It took place on a grander scale; it lasted longer; the methods both sides employed were more severe; and the language the English adopted to justify and document it was more dismissive of Indian culture – Indian religious beliefs; Indian warfare; Indian’s use of the land; and, ultimately, Indian sovereignty – than it had ever been before. In some important way King Philip’s War was a defining moment, when any lingering, though slight, possibility for Algonquian political and cultural autonomy was lost and when the English moved one giant step closer to the worldview that would create, a century and a half later, the Indian removal policy adopted by Andrew Jackson” (pg. 166-167). Further examining the legacy, Lepore writes, “For Cotton Mather, as for his father, King Philip’s War was a holy war, a war against barbarism, and a war that never really ended” (pg. 175). Lepore concludes, “No matter how much the colonists wrote about the war, no matter how much or how eloquently they justified their cause and conduct or vilified Philip, New England’s colonists could never succeed at reconstructing themselves as ‘true Englishmen.’ The danger of degenerating into Indians continued to haunt them” (pg. 175). Later, “clothed in revolutionary rhetoric, the memory of King Philip’s War was invoked to urge the colonists to free themselves from the ‘captivity’ they now suffered under British tyranny” (pg. 188).
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LibraryThing member setnahkt
Not at all what I expected, but not half bad. Although The Name of War is subtitled “King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity”, it isn’t about King Philip’s War or the origins of American identity. The narrative is not chronological, so there’s little to nothing about the
I did something I usually don’t do, which was read through reviews on Amazon before writing my own. There are plenty of negative reviews, which condemn author Jill Lepore as “revisionist” and “politically correct” and “biased against whites”. I don’t really see that. I have to say I also don’t agree with the jacket blurb from the Boston Globe that claims “…her drama matches that of a fine novelist…”; nobody would ever mistake this for a novel. It’s a densely written academic work that takes considerable effort to read.
Lepore apologizes right off for not being able to tell things from the Wampanoag side. Very few of the Wampanoag were literate, either in English or “Massachusetts” (which is what the colonists called their language), despite the fact that at least one (“John Printer”) was instrumental in producing a Massachusetts translation of the Bible, which probably had the distinction of being the first book in history that had more copies printed than there were people able to read it. She does speculate slightly on possible native attitudes – noting, for example, that just as the English assumed the natives had “princes” who could make decisions on behalf of their “subjects” so the Wampanoag and their allies were mystified that Connecticut and Rhode Island and Massachusetts all sent troops to fight in what the natives thought was a war between them and Plymouth Colony; just as the Algonquians didn’t see themselves as a unified group but as Wampanoag and Narragansett and Pequot, who might make temporary alliances but were essentially different, so they assumed that the colonists were the same way. (One of the useful things I learned was that in 1675 Massachusetts and Plymouth were two separate colonies).
But there’s enough from the colonist’s point of view to fill a book. A major theme is our forefathers and mothers were a whole lot more religious than even the Westboro Baptist Church. This is something that seldom crops up in historical novels or period movies. It’s a given that the war is an affliction sent by God to punish New England for its sins. It’s similarly a given that any success – from the rescue of Mary Rowlandson from captivity to overall victory in the war – is a direct manifestation of God’s mercy. It came as a telling revelation that I felt myself identifying more with the Wampanoag –despite their habits of systematically cutting the fingers, toes, arms and legs off their captives, one joint at a time, before burning them alive - than the colonists, whose all-pervading religiosity seemed strange and alien. An example almost as chilling as Wampanoag POW practices is the colonial discussion over what to do with King Philip’s captured son – about 9 years old at the time. The debate was conducted entirely with dueling Bible verses – the admonitions in Deuteronomy 24:16 and II Chronicles 25:4 being laid against Psalms 137:8-9. Eventually it was decided that Philip’s son and other captives should not be executed, but rather sold into slavery in the West Indies (to the profit of the colonial governments). Ironically, the savagery of the war and the repeated colonial complaints about the “untrustworthiness” of the natives during it depressed the market, and there were few or no buyers; several cargoes were apparently taken all the way to Tangier for sale, leading to the interesting observation that there are probably people in Morocco with more Native American ancestry than Ward Churchill.
A second theme is the colonist’s indignation on discovering a people who didn’t behave like them. (As already mentioned the natives had similar opinions but didn’t get to write them up). The colonists condemned the Wampanoag for “skulking” – attacking from ambush in small groups rather than meeting the enemy in “manly” fashion in the open. This was carried to the extent that native captives who could prove at their trials that they killed face-to-face in “soldierly” fashion were acquitted from murder charges (which is not to say that things went all that well for them after the acquittal). The charge of “skulking” is especially ironic considering what the descendants of the colonists were doing exactly 100 years later. Other ways in which the Wampanoag proved their savagery was by not owning land; by not keeping domestic animals, and, as mentioned, by not having a legitimate government with “rulers” and “subjects”.
The last part of the book covers an interesting and repeated phenomenon in American history; the gradual change of one generation’s villains to another generations heroes. By the 19th century, King Philip had changed from a bloodthirsty savage to a noble patriot. A stage play based on the war, Metamora, was one of the most popular productions in the country from around 1820 to 1840 or so. In it, Philip gets the chance to declaim at length about the perfidious colonials and their mistreatment of the natives. Metamora was especially popular in New England, where there was no longer any noticeable native presence; it was booed off the stage in Georgia, where the Cherokees were being marched off to Oklahoma. (The name “Metamora” is based on “Metacomet”, which was believed to be Philip’s Wampanoag name; as Lepore points out he used the name “Philip” in all his dealings with English speakers and his mark on documents was a stylized “P”). In a slightly strange coda, Lepore discusses the Mount Hope Rock, a slab of greywacke on the beach in Bristol, Rhode Island. There are various markings on the rock, now illegible from erosion but when discovered believed to be an engraving of a Norse longship and runic writing. An alternative theory was presented by Brown University professor Edmund Delabarre – who, although a psychology professor, was an enthusiast for supposedly ancient rock inscriptions in the Americas. Delabarre proposed that the inscription was not in Norse, but in Cherokee (in the sense that it uses the Cherokee alphabet); but it’s not in the Cherokee language, but in Algonquian, and it reads “Metacomet Great Sachem”. Lapore gives rather more attention than it deserves to the idea that persons unknown would engrave such an inscription on a rock in Rhode Island.
The main flaw in the book is that it doesn’t really discuss King Philip’s War. This was the single bloodiest conflict in North American history in terms of percentage of population lost – even exceeding the Civil War – and was the only time the natives had a serious chance of driving the colonists back into the sea. As it was, all interior population centers in Massachusetts and Plymouth were sacked; if Philip hadn’t been fighting a two front war against the Mohawks and if he could have persuaded a few more Algonquian groups to take part it might have been a different story. Lapore mentions all this, but it’s scattered through the text; a short introductory chapter that gave a chronological history of the war would have been really valuable.
Well referenced, but could use a single bibliography rather than suggestions scattered through the endnotes. Illustrations of some of the participants, including the only known depiction of the war, which is a small drawing of some natives with bows facing some colonists with muskets. Worth reading, even if tedious in spots.
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sequence of events in the war; and nobody on either side ever refers to themselves as an “American”. Instead what it’s about is the attitude of New England colonists toward themselves and the natives.I did something I usually don’t do, which was read through reviews on Amazon before writing my own. There are plenty of negative reviews, which condemn author Jill Lepore as “revisionist” and “politically correct” and “biased against whites”. I don’t really see that. I have to say I also don’t agree with the jacket blurb from the Boston Globe that claims “…her drama matches that of a fine novelist…”; nobody would ever mistake this for a novel. It’s a densely written academic work that takes considerable effort to read.
Lepore apologizes right off for not being able to tell things from the Wampanoag side. Very few of the Wampanoag were literate, either in English or “Massachusetts” (which is what the colonists called their language), despite the fact that at least one (“John Printer”) was instrumental in producing a Massachusetts translation of the Bible, which probably had the distinction of being the first book in history that had more copies printed than there were people able to read it. She does speculate slightly on possible native attitudes – noting, for example, that just as the English assumed the natives had “princes” who could make decisions on behalf of their “subjects” so the Wampanoag and their allies were mystified that Connecticut and Rhode Island and Massachusetts all sent troops to fight in what the natives thought was a war between them and Plymouth Colony; just as the Algonquians didn’t see themselves as a unified group but as Wampanoag and Narragansett and Pequot, who might make temporary alliances but were essentially different, so they assumed that the colonists were the same way. (One of the useful things I learned was that in 1675 Massachusetts and Plymouth were two separate colonies).
But there’s enough from the colonist’s point of view to fill a book. A major theme is our forefathers and mothers were a whole lot more religious than even the Westboro Baptist Church. This is something that seldom crops up in historical novels or period movies. It’s a given that the war is an affliction sent by God to punish New England for its sins. It’s similarly a given that any success – from the rescue of Mary Rowlandson from captivity to overall victory in the war – is a direct manifestation of God’s mercy. It came as a telling revelation that I felt myself identifying more with the Wampanoag –despite their habits of systematically cutting the fingers, toes, arms and legs off their captives, one joint at a time, before burning them alive - than the colonists, whose all-pervading religiosity seemed strange and alien. An example almost as chilling as Wampanoag POW practices is the colonial discussion over what to do with King Philip’s captured son – about 9 years old at the time. The debate was conducted entirely with dueling Bible verses – the admonitions in Deuteronomy 24:16 and II Chronicles 25:4 being laid against Psalms 137:8-9. Eventually it was decided that Philip’s son and other captives should not be executed, but rather sold into slavery in the West Indies (to the profit of the colonial governments). Ironically, the savagery of the war and the repeated colonial complaints about the “untrustworthiness” of the natives during it depressed the market, and there were few or no buyers; several cargoes were apparently taken all the way to Tangier for sale, leading to the interesting observation that there are probably people in Morocco with more Native American ancestry than Ward Churchill.
A second theme is the colonist’s indignation on discovering a people who didn’t behave like them. (As already mentioned the natives had similar opinions but didn’t get to write them up). The colonists condemned the Wampanoag for “skulking” – attacking from ambush in small groups rather than meeting the enemy in “manly” fashion in the open. This was carried to the extent that native captives who could prove at their trials that they killed face-to-face in “soldierly” fashion were acquitted from murder charges (which is not to say that things went all that well for them after the acquittal). The charge of “skulking” is especially ironic considering what the descendants of the colonists were doing exactly 100 years later. Other ways in which the Wampanoag proved their savagery was by not owning land; by not keeping domestic animals, and, as mentioned, by not having a legitimate government with “rulers” and “subjects”.
The last part of the book covers an interesting and repeated phenomenon in American history; the gradual change of one generation’s villains to another generations heroes. By the 19th century, King Philip had changed from a bloodthirsty savage to a noble patriot. A stage play based on the war, Metamora, was one of the most popular productions in the country from around 1820 to 1840 or so. In it, Philip gets the chance to declaim at length about the perfidious colonials and their mistreatment of the natives. Metamora was especially popular in New England, where there was no longer any noticeable native presence; it was booed off the stage in Georgia, where the Cherokees were being marched off to Oklahoma. (The name “Metamora” is based on “Metacomet”, which was believed to be Philip’s Wampanoag name; as Lepore points out he used the name “Philip” in all his dealings with English speakers and his mark on documents was a stylized “P”). In a slightly strange coda, Lepore discusses the Mount Hope Rock, a slab of greywacke on the beach in Bristol, Rhode Island. There are various markings on the rock, now illegible from erosion but when discovered believed to be an engraving of a Norse longship and runic writing. An alternative theory was presented by Brown University professor Edmund Delabarre – who, although a psychology professor, was an enthusiast for supposedly ancient rock inscriptions in the Americas. Delabarre proposed that the inscription was not in Norse, but in Cherokee (in the sense that it uses the Cherokee alphabet); but it’s not in the Cherokee language, but in Algonquian, and it reads “Metacomet Great Sachem”. Lapore gives rather more attention than it deserves to the idea that persons unknown would engrave such an inscription on a rock in Rhode Island.
The main flaw in the book is that it doesn’t really discuss King Philip’s War. This was the single bloodiest conflict in North American history in terms of percentage of population lost – even exceeding the Civil War – and was the only time the natives had a serious chance of driving the colonists back into the sea. As it was, all interior population centers in Massachusetts and Plymouth were sacked; if Philip hadn’t been fighting a two front war against the Mohawks and if he could have persuaded a few more Algonquian groups to take part it might have been a different story. Lapore mentions all this, but it’s scattered through the text; a short introductory chapter that gave a chronological history of the war would have been really valuable.
Well referenced, but could use a single bibliography rather than suggestions scattered through the endnotes. Illustrations of some of the participants, including the only known depiction of the war, which is a small drawing of some natives with bows facing some colonists with muskets. Worth reading, even if tedious in spots.
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LibraryThing member JBD1
An excellent analyis of this colonial war and its many impacts on American history.
LibraryThing member storyteller
The message is that the literature of colonialists during this war escalated the hatred of native Americans. Lepore gives good insight into the problems brought about by this war but only cites details from accounts that support her point of view. She doesn't take into consideration the history of
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Mather and the social commentary of Church. Nor does she dwell on positive accounts of the war and period, by those who were captured by the Indians and chose to remain a part of Indian tribal life. Show Less
LibraryThing member theageofsilt
A must-read for residents of New England, especially Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The ground you walk on was the site of one of the most lethal wars in American history. Fascinating work!
LibraryThing member herebedragons
I read this book for a university history class. It was a good read, about an historical event I had never even heard of before this class. King Phillip (aka Metacom) was a sachem of the Wampanoag Indians in New England in the late 17th century, who went to war against European settlers in the
The book does a good job, I thought, of presenting things in a neutral way - looking at the way the history of events has been presented over time (contemporary accounts of the war, and those later in history), and how the way people viewed the war was shaped by what was being written. The book was mostly well-written, certainly not dry in the way that many history texts can be.
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area. The book does a good job, I thought, of presenting things in a neutral way - looking at the way the history of events has been presented over time (contemporary accounts of the war, and those later in history), and how the way people viewed the war was shaped by what was being written. The book was mostly well-written, certainly not dry in the way that many history texts can be.
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LibraryThing member simchaboston
Another fascinating historical study from Jill Lepore, this one about this little-remembered seventeenth-century conflict between New England colonists and Native Americans. (Though who fought whom is, as she clarifies, is not as straightforward as a X vs. Y summation would suggest.) Lepore not
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only lays out the chronology and the tensions that gave rise to King Philip's War, but explains, in her usual lucid and insightful prose, how the colonists sought to separate themselves from the "savages" (even the Christian Indians, who had converted), vilified the Native American cruelties while justifying their own, and controlled the narratives that came out of the conflict. Thankfully this book is a much-needed corrective to the colonists' triumphant stories. Show Less
LibraryThing member joeydag
Some brilliant passages, but unfortunately some really dry stretches. I was born in New England and the subject of the conflict between the colonists and some natives was new history to me. 1675-76 is not too far from just setting up the colonies and this war devastated whole towns and villages.
I haven't read anything by this author that has not been worth it.
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Some big issues too! The colonists worried about going native. The decision to fight versus convert the natives. The big issues of sovereignty and land ownership. I did not know about the awful treatment of the Christian natives and the selling of the natives into slavery! I haven't read anything by this author that has not been worth it.
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LibraryThing member wickenden
Lepore takes us on the original American journey of war. As members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony moved further westward, the once welcoming Algonquin Indians waged war. The war, at first decried for its tactics, became the mode for the invaders and brutality led to brutality. Lepore argues that
A wonderful read.
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this war created the American identity, this war waged 100 years before the American revolution.A wonderful read.
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LibraryThing member Othemts
Jill Lepore explores the history of King Philip's War, fought in New England from 1675 to 1678 between an alliance of several Algonquian-speaking indigenous tribes under the leadership of Wampanoag Chief Metacomet, a.k.a. King Philip, and the English of the New England colonies and their Mohegan,
Lepore investigates how the war changed the way the English colonists identified themselves. She also examines the historical resources to find the Native perspective on the war that's not often directly recorded in Western literature. A large part of the book focuses on the captivity narratives that became one of the major forms of literature that arose from the war. She also details the lasting legacy of the war, particularly how Metacomet became a romanticized figure in American drama in the mid-1800s at the same time that Andrew Jackson is forcibly removing the Cherokee from the Southeastern states.
It is a very interesting historical account of a significant but forgotten war and a historiology of the study of war itself.
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Pequot, and Mohawk allies. The war is poorly defined in American history with even the name controversial. Was Philip a King? Was his name even Philip? Was it really a war or an exchange of atrocities?Lepore investigates how the war changed the way the English colonists identified themselves. She also examines the historical resources to find the Native perspective on the war that's not often directly recorded in Western literature. A large part of the book focuses on the captivity narratives that became one of the major forms of literature that arose from the war. She also details the lasting legacy of the war, particularly how Metacomet became a romanticized figure in American drama in the mid-1800s at the same time that Andrew Jackson is forcibly removing the Cherokee from the Southeastern states.
It is a very interesting historical account of a significant but forgotten war and a historiology of the study of war itself.
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Subjects
Awards
Ralph Waldo Emerson Award (Winner — 1998)
James P. Hanlan Book Award (1998)
Bancroft Prize (1999)
Mark Lynton History Prize (Finalist — 1999)
Language
Original publication date
1998
Physical description
xxviii, 337 p.; 21 inches
ISBN
0375702628150