The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

Jill Lepore

Knopf, 1998 - Great Britain - 337 pages

Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society
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."
It all began when Philip (called Metacom by his own people), the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. The war spread quickly, pitting a loose confederation of southeastern Algonquians against a coalition of English colonists. While it raged, colonial armies pursued enemy Indians through the swamps and woods of New England, and Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley. Both sides, in fact, had pursued the war seemingly without restraint, killing women and children, torturing captives, and mutilating the dead. The fighting ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in August 1676.
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. She shows how, as late as the nineteenth century, memories of the war were instrumental in justifying Indian removals--and how inour own century that same war has inspired Indian attempts to preserve "Indianness" as fiercely as the early settlers once struggled to preserve their Englishness.
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.

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User Review  - Othemts - LibraryThing

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 ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - wickenden - LibraryThing

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 ...

Contents

• Prologue The Circle: 3
• Beware of Any Linguist: 21
• The Story of It Printed 88: 48

About the author

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has written several books including Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Joe Gould's Teeth, and These Truths: A History of the United States.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity; A Borzoi book
• Author: Jill Lepore
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Knopf, 1998
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Sep 15, 2008
• ISBN: 0679446869, 9780679446866
• Length: 337 pages