The Name of War: King Philips War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore

The Name of War: King Philips War and the Origins of American Identity Reviews

• 
  Matt

  “The story of King Philip’s War…is the story of how English colonists became Americans, and of the sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward, sometimes brutal posturing by which they positioned themselves in relation to the indigenous people of America and of Europe. It is a story of words and wounds and of resurrections…”
  - Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity
  
  “Had we been cannibals here might we feast.”
  - Benjamin Tompson, recounting the massacre of Narragansett Indians at the “Great Swamp Fight” in 1675
  
  
  On January 29, 1675, a Christian Indian named John Sassamon died at Assawampsett Pond, his body found beneath the ice. Perhaps he had fallen through. Perhaps life had become too much, and he drowned himself. According to Indian witnesses, however, he was murdered by three Wampanoag Indians who were confederates of Metacom, known to history as King Phillip. The theory was that Sassamon was killed for warning the governor of Plymouth Colony of a potential attack by King Philip’s forces.
  
  The three alleged murderers were hanged in June. Shortly thereafter, Wampanoags raided the settlement of Swansea, then Rehoboth and Taunton.
  
  The war that followed has carved itself a bloody niche in history as being one of the most brutal ever fought – on a per capita basis – in North America. A dozen towns burned and one-tenth of military-age colonists were killed. Some mark the end of the war as occurring on August 12, 1676, when King Philip was killed by an Indian fighting with the colonial forces of Benjamin Church. Others say the war did not end until December 29, 1890, when the Seventh Cavalry killed around 300 men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek, marking the symbolic end of the Indian Wars.
  
  The story of King Philip’s War is fascinating and complex and it is definitely worth reading about.
  
  But if you are looking for a standard history on this savage conflict, fought one-hundred years before Lexington and Concord, then you need to take a pass on Jill Lepore’s The Name of War.
  
  Seriously. Just keep looking.
  
  The Name of War is not interested in a chronological account of events; it is not interested in the character or biographies of the men and women caught in the vortex; it is most certainly not a military history. To give you an example: Lepore does not narrate a single battle or raid, yet devotes an entire chapter to a now-forgotten stage play called Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags, which premiered in 1829 and ended its run sometime in 1887.
  
  I say this not to warn you off a bad book, but to keep you from being disappointed by a good one.
  
  The Name of War is a work of historiography. It tries to explain how King Philip’s War was written about and remembered. The concepts of memory and cultural identity that are explored here are often dense and hard to summarize.
  
  This style of book is tricky, because it relies heavily on interpretations and generalizations that sometimes feels like a parody of academia. For instance, Lepore delivers lines like this:
  
  

  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. Bodies were defined in relationship to houses, but houses, too, were metaphorical bodies…

  
  
  Continuing this thought, Lepore talks about a man named Thomas Wakely, who refused to heed warnings about an impending raid, and died in his house. Of him, Lepore concludes:
  
  

  If building a house on a piece of land makes that land your own, and if the land you own defines who you are, then losing that house becomes a very troubling prospect indeed.

  
  
  Okay. On the one hand, sure, that makes sense. On the other hand, this reeks of overthinking. Chances are, Thomas Wakely died because he underestimated the risk, not because he feared losing his true self.
  
  While I am not fully investing in what Lepore has to sell, The Name of War is insightful and interesting. There is a solid chapter on what Lepore calls “moral vocabulary,” which discusses how the colonists vilified the Indians who scalped and mutilated the dead, while ignoring the identical desecrations committed by their side. (King Philip, for instance, was quartered, and his head removed and displayed prominently in Plymouth for years and years and years).
  
  Another worthy section is devoted to the fate of Philip’s nine-year-old son, who became the subject of a fierce debate among Puritan intellectuals as to whether he deserved to live (a position supported by Deuteronomy, where the son does not inherit his father's sins) or die (a position supported by the general, asshole-ish disposition of the Puritans). Eventually, these men of God showed their mercy and allowed the child to be sold into bondage, which gives Lepore an opportunity to explore this underdiscussed aspect of American slavery.
  
  The Name of War does not try to stake out the moral high ground between the Indians and the colonists. In other words, this is not simple Puritan-bashing. As Lepore demonstrates, there was cruelty enough to go around. Of course, when the last bullet was fired, and the last dwelling burned, only one side got to write about it.
  
  In a real sense, then, The Name of War is about how a group of people – soon to be a new nation – attempted to rationalize their deeds, and to find a way to live with the things they had done.
• 
  Ram

  "The colonists MUST have FELT, as the Indians' flaming arrows PENETRATED the SKINS of the white MAN'S houses, that they THEMSELVES WERE BEING PENETRATED by the DARK OTHERS whose own violence was now being WRITTEN ON the BODY as well as the LANDSCAPE in bold strokes."
  
  If you like speculation and taking flimsy evidence and using it to put words in the mouths of historical actors, then you'll dig this book. Postmodern, literary techniques work sometimes to tell the stories of persons who cannot speak through the existing record. But, Lepore uses highly-suspect reasoning to tell a story of her own invention that is disrespectful to her subjects and will appeal only to those (guilty, white) readers who have a particular view of what "American identity" is. This book is the antithesis of what postmodernism promised.
• 
  Amy

  Truly fantastic. Lepore has mastered the art of history-telling; she tells the story as straight as it can be told from the historical record, and makes incisive connections to other historical events, eras, and emotional epochs. If history had been old like this when I was in school, many fewer kids would have hated it. Also, many fewer kids would have turned into unthinking, racist, 'Merica First! assholes. Nuance and empathy are important parts of understanding what has happened before so that we can understand what is happening now, and better shape what will happen in the future. Excellent work.
• 
  Ryan

  Thorough and intellectually ambitious. This isn't really a history of King Philip's War (1675-6); if you're looking for a narrative of the conflict you'll be disappointed. It is rather a study of the way that the experience and memory of the war was constructed by the English colonists of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut during the war years and immediately following, how that construction contributed to the construction of early American identity, and how it was actively used a century and a half after the war by the advocates and opponents of Indian removal west of the Mississippi. Good and thought-provoking.
• 
  Brian

  In the Name of War is a revisionist interpretation of King Philips War. This is not a history of the war and provides an example of how the colonists at the time interpreted various aspects of the war. From seizing of colonists to selling Indians into slavery the effects of the war were traced throughout the war period. The brutality of the war is captured through the narrative that she lays out but in the end you really have to be interested in the time period to get something out of it. Like many things written about Indians there is a general feeling that the author must apologize for not being an Indian writing about Indians and that comes through in this book. In the end it is lackluster and boring with little for those looking for a history of the war.
• 
  Tim

  Lepore's work here disappointed. She has obviously done substantial research, I just do not find her theoretical framework all that satisfying. Maybe I do not fancy books about "the worst fatal war in American history" that analyze language and memory and lack much human sympathy. A work that takes the "English" to task for not understanding the Wampanoag but seems fairly nonchalant in its lack of understanding (and frankly stereotypical portrayal) of the Puritan.
• 
  James

  An engaging history of the Native American and English colonists war of the 1670s. This account of the war, and its later cultural and political usages, explain much of the trajectory of US and Native American interactions and injustices. I found the account balanced in presentation. But there is plenty of non-Native American guilt to be acknowledged here by the historical facts.
  
  LePore’s book is probably most interesting in her account of how this war was used culturally and politically by both non- and Native Americans in the ensuing decades and centuries. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the subject as well as to anyone interested in how war images and language are perpetuated and manipulated for further non-war ends.
  
  My only criticism (this coming from a non-expert and non-specialist in history) is that some of LePore’s conclusions sometimes seemed more like suppositions than inductively established inferences. I found none egregious; but a few questionable. (But again, as an “armchair” historian, I may not understand the detailed dynamics of such research.)
  
  Highly recommend. Not a long read.
• 
  Michael

  More like a 3.5 - not a history of the war (which was what I was looking for) but more an interpretation of contemporary and then subsequent reactions/understandings of the war (which in fairness I should have known had I bothered to read the back cover before purchasing).
• 
  Sara

  The Name of War is a thematically-structured meditation on the violent and significant conflict known as King Philip's War, fought between English colonists and Native Americans in 1675-6. The fighting occurred primarily in New England between, on the one hand, English colonists of the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies, the Mohegan and Pequot tribes along with so-called "praying Indians" who had converted to Christianity, and on the other hand, the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Abenaki and Pocumtuck tribes.
  
  King Philip’s War produced a considerable number of (English-written) narratives and histories, most famously The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Mary Rowlandson’s tale of her captivity by Narragansetts and Wampanoags following their attack on Lancaster. Lepore makes a persuasive case that this and the other narratives of the war reasserted English colonial identity as English at least as much as engaging in the war itself did. Decades of close proximity with the native inhabitants of what the English absurdly called New England had not resulted in mass native conversion to Christianity, as the colonists had hoped. It had instead, asserts Lepore, created hybrid populations of Indians who, for instance, spoke English and wore English clothes but lived in wigwams, and English people who lived farther and farther from English-built towns, no longer attended church or had culturally or familially absorbed or been absorbed by native people. In other words, English colonists in the 1670s were beginning to experience an identity crisis. They could see breaking down the visual cues and behavioral codes they relied upon to differentiate people from each other; most importantly to them, to differentiate English from Indian.
  
  While carefully dissecting the English war writings, Lepore also examines – to the extent sources allow – Indian motivations for and responses to war; all the while considering what it means for both the English and Native American visions of the war that the historical record contains only English-language narratives written by white people. The primary point of interest for me regarding this topic, is the particular position and vulnerability of the hybrid person in this context. Over and over again, Indians who knew English, acted as translators of language and culture, or had actually converted to Christianity, became the least trusted group of people, attacked by both sides equally. In fact, the murder of one such man, the Christian Indian John Sassamon, either caused or comprised (depending on how you dice it) the first hostility of King Philip’s War. Anglicized Indians who were captured by the Narragansetts or Wampanoags were sometimes tortured and at the very least intimidated by their Indian captors. Yet if they escaped and fled to an English town, they were put on trial for treason and usually only exculpated in the eyes of English colonists by murdering a certain number of combatant Native Americans and supplying proof in the form of severed heads. And this was a “best case scenario”. In a worst case, the English authorities forced entire towns of praying Indians into an internment camp on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where most either died or were sold into slavery.
  
  Lepore’s careful treatment of King Philip’s War, of colonial writings about the war, of later Native and Anglo-American remembrance (or ignorance) of the war, ultimately underscore the ways writing and memory about war are indivisible from war itself. More importantly, she reminds her readers about an under-discussed, over-obscure war that was, arguably, one of the most revealing and disturbing conflicts in the history of Anglo settlement in North America.
  
• 
  Jeremy Perron

  In my last post I described how a short while ago, I decided to do a straight reading up on the history of my country. Not by a series of biographies or of any particular event; but a simple march through the ages exploring all the eras of the United States of America. The first challenge is to find books that try their best to explore from multiple perspectives avoiding just one narrow view, without at the same time surrendering a general narrative that is both readable and enjoyable. The second challenge is determining where to start. I suppose I could start at the American Revolution or all the way back to Mesopotamia. I finally decided to start with A History of England by Clayton and David Roberts. After getting done with the mother county I moved on to this book by Jill Leopre, generally because of Leopre's reputation of exploring history with memory. Her book deals with early English colonists and how they related to and fought with Native American tribes. Lepore's dealing with both points of view (colonist and Native) during the colonial era surrounding the events leading up to, during, and aftermath of King Phillip's War.
  
  Jill Lepore's book is about one of earliest wars in American history and how the conflict would shape the identity of both sides involved. Lepore writes of colonists that left England for the purpose of religious separatism yet are always concerned about losing their Englishness due to the Natives' presence, and also the Native tribes willingness to explore this relationship while it benefited them balanced with their concern about losing their tribal and cultural identity due to the presence of the English. This fear of loss of identity would be one of the primary reasons for the conflict that ironically would change the culture of both dramatically, making the English 'Americans' and the various tribes 'Indians'.
  
  Lepore's work is very academic in tone and a very difficult narrative to at times follow. Each chapter has about a page and a half of narrative and the rest is analysis. I found the most interesting parts of the book to be the introduction, preface, and final chapter. Those sections contained fascinating insights to how war is interpreted down the generations.
  
  "Clearly, literacy is not an uncomplicated tool, like a pen or a printing press. Instead literacy is bound, as it was for New England's Indians, by the conditions under which it is acquired; in this case at great cost. To become literate, seventeenth-century Indians had first to make a graduated succession of cultural concessions--adopting English ways and English dress, living in towns, learning to speak English, converting to Christianity. But these very concessions made them vulnerable. Neither English nor Indian, assimilated Indians were scorned by both groups and even were subject to attack. Because the acquisition of literacy, and especially English-language literacy, was one of last steps on the road to assimilation, Indians who could read and write placed themselves in a particularly perilous, if at the same time a powerful position, caught between two worlds but fully accepted by neither." p.27
  
  I would recommend this book to advanced readers who would like an introduction into one of America's least understood conflicts, but I think the causal readers would best be served by looking somewhere else because this book does border on the technical side. Nevertheless, this work does a great job at exploring the conflict from many angles and explaining the context for which the war was fought.
• 
  David Bates

  Jill Lepore’s 1998 work The Name of War explores one of the flash points where violence blazed up in the late 17th century – the uprising known alternately as King Philips War and Metacom’s Rebellion. A meditation on war, and the way the colonists chose to portray it in words in order to understand its meaning and justify their actions, Lepore’s fundamental concern is to understand the issues of identity which were in her view both the war’s cause and lasting effect. The collapse of the political and commercial alliance established by Metacom’s father Massasoit due to increasing English encroachment and population pressure sparked the outbreak of violence, but Lepore suggests that the rejection was at root much more profound. In the attacks which the allied Algonquian tribes led by Metacom led on town after town, pushing back English settlement to the coast, a fundamental polarity of identities was being established – one which eliminated boundary crossers of doubtful loyalty first, leaving only the victorious English to codify the meaning of the conflict for history. There, for Lepore, lies the fundamental paradox of “the waging and writing of King Philip’s War: the same cultural tensions that caused the war – Indians becoming Anglicized and the English becoming Indianized – meant that literate Indians . . . those most likely to record their version of the events of the war, were among its earliest casualties.” Instead Metacom and his follwers would record their only arguments in the wounds they inflicted, as one Englishman observed “drawing his own report in blud not Ink.” From the ashes of the conflict would emerge influential rhetorical accounts of Indian savagery and threatened English identity Lepore contends set the stage for an American identity fundamentally hostile to coexistence. Despite the poignancy of her exploration of war as a contest of “wounds and words,” careful reconstruction so far as possible of Metacom’s side of the dispute, and her detailed analysis of English image making, Lepore may ultimately be reaching too far in claiming for the conflict the construction of core elements of American nationalist identity.
• 
  Scottsdale Public Library

  When we read about history past, how can we know how much of what we read is true? Much of history is written based on what someone wrote down. Therefore, much of history could be said to be biased. Between the years of 1675 and 1682, there were twenty-one separate, printed, accounts of King Philip’s War which took place in southern New England, the majority published in London. King Philip, an Algonquian Indian whose real name was Metacom, was killed in August 1676 although the war did not end with his death. Did the colonists win the war or did the Indians? This is a story about the depiction of warring factions according to those who write it and how those warring factions view one another as well as themselves. A fascinating account of the events leading up to and after King Philip’s War as viewed by those involved vis-à-vis.--Anna Q.L.
• 
  Doug

  I started reading this book after I found out that one of my ancestors was killed in King Philip's War at the Battle of the Great Swamp, December 1675. The first two thirds of the book was OK - how did the war start? what was each side's greivance? But the last third was awful.
• 
  Alice

  From the start, it’s clear that this book is meticulously researched and more thoughtfully put together than nearly any work of non-fiction I’ve encountered. Lepore’s skills as a historian and her precision in delineating what is known, what was written, and what we can assume is clear on every page.
  
  But it was *hard* for me to read this book. The number of unfamiliar names for people and places stretched over an area that I know in the present combined with the lengthy quotes from the 17th century that with all of the creative spelling and unusual grammar tripped me up, requiring more mental energy than I often had when I sat down to read the book. This combined with initially reading the book in hardback with a broken spine (from the library) meant that I often only finished a few pages before falling asleep, which made it even harder to follow the narrative thread.
  
  It’s clear that we will never really know the details of King Philip’s War the way we know about 20th century wars, and where I came looking for a basic overview of the conflict’s particulars, they weren’t what this book is about.
  
  What this book does well is explore the ways that early European (mostly English) colonists/settlers/occupiers in what are today the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island needed to assert their identities in contrast to the native people living around them. That their fear and arrogance drove them to not only wage war with the indigenous population but also write about it with such self righteous disgust is telling.
  
  I found the book most compelling in its final quarter where Lepore unpacks the way the war impacted perceptions of Americanness and Indianness in the 19th and even 20th century. Even if the war itself did not eliminate the Wampanoag and other tribes, it strangely laid the foundation for white Americans to imagine that those tribes and successive others had disappeared even as they persist today. It for this reason in particular that I would recommend this book.
• 
  Elly Call

  This is absolutely an underrated book. Even though it didn't have to define the entire American experience and could have just stuck to the war itself, Lepore perfectly encapsulated Colonist experience, racism, and hysteria. I can't speak as much to this because of holes in my own research, but from what I could tell she was extremely well researched and informed on the subject of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Delaware, Pequot and Nipmuck nation relations, cultural priorities, and experience as well. It has been almost impossible to find information on all these nations' experiences' of injustice at the hands of the English colonists, so Lepore's writing on the subject is a gift, and she lists historians she drew from, too, which is so so helpful! She's clearly a gifted writer, she is absurdly well-researched, and I'm so grateful to have found this book.
  
  One problem though, and it's a big one—she constantly referred to the different tribes as "Indians." At first, I thought she was just quoting from the HEAVILY biased historical accounts of the war from Increase and Cotton Mathers, but she used it at every part of the book and it's distractingly wrong. I don't know everything about this subject—but I do know no one wants to use Christopher Columbus's geographic mistakes to refer to themselves. I'm not sure exactly how Wampanoag, Narragansett, Delaware, Pequot, and Nipmuck nationals prefer to be referred to, but using "Indian" for everybody told me that Lepore didn't work with people of any of these nations all that closely otherwise I think they would've told her off or corrected her. My best understanding is that "Indian" is offensive if used by white people. Or anyone non-first nations. I could be wrong, maybe she did work closely with people of these nations, but I'd be surprised.
  
  So, loved this book—the impact of King Philip's war on the American psyche is def undertaught. But it had a few problems. Still informative. I'm gonna see if I can find some Narragansett writers who've addressed this topic though.
• 
  Charlotte

  The Name of War is a fascinating account of King Philip's War, a violent and bloody affair in which the second generation New England Colonists were pitted against King Philip (Metacom) and various indigeous peoples of the area. As each side fights this war to maintain their cultural identity, each group inevitably changes. These changes impact what later becomes a cultural identity unique to the United States. If you love history, Colonial American history, war history, or just enjoy reading about gory violence, this book is for you.
• 
  Pádraig Lawlor

  In The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, Jill Lepore seeks to analyze a conflict between Native Americans and colonists residing in New England. Both factions erupted into the brutal conflict known King Philip's War, named after Philip, the leader of the Wampanoag Indians. Exclusive to Lepore's argumentative framework is her concentrated focus on war and memory. Indeed, her examination concerns the role of recollection in the field of historical analyses and what dangers such an approach presents. In the enduring dispute, language, as Lepore contests, became a critical factor in our understanding of perhaps one of the bloodiest American wars. This line of enquiry drives Lepore's pursuit for the earliest expressions of "American identity." Lepore's analytical and theoretical style is best demonstrated in her fluent entwining of interpretive passages with an absorbing narrative. Her work encompasses both primary analysis and synthesis, utilizing materials from newspapers and personal correspondence to histories such as Frederick Jackson Turner's, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893). What is significant regarding her use of secondary material is the scarcity thereof from the past half-century. Lepore is advantageous in her use of primary material. King Philip's War compelled a large number of English colonists to justify the war. Consequently, they penned their reasons for warfare, much to the historians' delight. What transpires, Lepore argues, is a feud embroiled in identity issues. On the battlefield, English, Native Americans, and European Americans struggled over such predicaments. She depicts the horrors of this conflict, from gruesome tortures to the massacre of women and children, so explicitly barbaric that the term "war" barely applies.
  
  Evading a chronological narrative, Lepore divides her arguments into four main parts: Language, War, Bondage, and Memory. In Part One, she demonstrates how literacy played an active role in igniting the war. Moreover, she examines how only the English captured stories in writing. Lepore illustrates her points by focusing on the case of John Sassamon, a Native American convert to Christianity and "praying Indian", who played a key role as a "cultural mediator" (p. 10). Sassamon's literacy, she claims, came a price. It allowed him the opportunity to speak to both groups, which adversely caused suspicion. In June 1675, English colonists charged and tried three Wampanoag Indians for the murder of Sassamon: Tobias, Wampapaquan, and Mattashunnamo. Although Historians have differed as to why the Wampanoags would have murdered Sassamon, Lepore suggests that "in a sense," it was literacy (p. 25). In Part Two, Lepore demonstrates the necessity of the captivity narrative in comprehending war. A narrative genre also utilized by contemporary historians such as Linda Colley and Pauline Turner Strong, she examines how the English settlers detested the uncivility the Native Americans portrayed. Their destruction of English houses, farms, crops, livestock, clothing, and bodies threatened to eradicate the colonists 'Englishness. The English considered writing about such action as a method to distinguish themselves from the uncivilized Native Americans. In Part Three, Lepore explores the differing experiences of those involved in the war such as Mary Rowlandson and Joshua Tift, an English renegade. Rowlandson, a colonial American woman who was captured by Native Americans during the war wrote of her ideal in, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). Here, Lepore portrays the complications and contradictions involved in such memoir writings. Whereas Rowlandson was later ransomed, others encountered a darker fate. Those charged with treason were either executed or enslaved after the war. Finally, in Part Four, Lepore discusses John Augustus Stone's Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829). She argues that this popular play exemplifies how later generations of European Americans remembered and learned about the war. Furthermore, she contests that this particular play serves as a single figure in a larger equation. When placed alongside Andrew Jackson's announcement of his Indian removal policy and William Apess's public lecture Eulogy on King Philip (1836), the play embodies the grander narrative involving the issue of sovereignty.
  
  In short, Lepore's work is a success. Whilst recapturing the ongoing struggles faced by Native Americans and colonists residing in New England, she also reminds the reader of the vulnerabilities involved in truly understanding past wars. Reconstruction is no easy feat. It is susceptible to many weaknesses evoked by what is considered 'fact' and 'fiction.' Whereas plays such as Stone's Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags reflect the nineteenth century's outlook of the war, it is vital one places the conflict in its correct context. Additionally, it is essential one considers sources from both Native Americans and Colonists. Although the lack of primary evidence can often yield the historians pen, she contends that other methodologies can bring about results. Indeed, placing the feud into the larger framework of American sovereignty and identity, Lepore encapsulates a masterful narrative. She convincingly posits that history is written by the victors, but that should not compel one to neglect those overpowered.
  
• 
  Vanessa

  though the title suggests it, this book is not about King Philip's War--the battle between Wampanoags and white settlers in Mass--it is rather about how the narrative of history--through texts and plays--and collective memory of the conflict have been used to shape identity in the centuries since.
• 
  Matthew

  I knew I was going to love this book when the author quoted Jeanette Winterson on the first page.
• 
  Frederick Channell

  Had to read this for a Colonial History class in college. Three other classmates did also. We all hated it. As dated as Flintlocks and Tomahawks is, it is a far better book on the war.
• 
  Steve Scott

  Jill Lepore's Bancroft Prize winning book is not so much a chronological history of King Philip's War (1675-1676) as it is an historical assessment of how colonists viewed and recorded the war, and their perceptions of the indigenous population they faced in the conflict. The indigenous perspective isn't presented in full because, as Lepore points out, there really wasn't anybody to present it.
  
  If the reader is unfamiliar with the war, I recommend doing some background reading before tackling this book. I had read Gabrielle Esposito's very brief overview of it in an Osprey publication, as well as Nathanial Philbrick's "Mayflower". The latter book is engaging and entertaining, but I may have to reconsider the review I'd given it after reading Lepore. Philbrick, as I recall, cast the skilled ranger and Indian fighter Benjamin Church as a somewhat sympathetic character in regards to the indigenous Narragansett leader Metacomet (King Philip). My recollection may be flawed, however...but even so I'd recommend that book wholeheartedly as background for Lepore's work. There might be better ones, of course, but it served me well.
  
  Lepore uncovers uncomfortable truths. The treachery and brutality of both sides in this war was horrible, but the English treatment of natives, even some of those Christian converts who sided with the English, was savage. And though 1 out of ten English colonists died in the conflict, thousands of natives were killed, starved to death, and enslaved to be sold overseas.
  
  I have seen some argue on social media that the conquering of America wasn't an intentional genocide of the indigenous populations. Lepore lets those that committed it testify that was indeed their intent, and in their own words. She doesn't tell you this. They do.
  
  The book doesn't end with the close of the 17th century. Lepore investigates the long term impact of the war well into the 19th century. A highly popular romantic melodrama, "Metamora: Or the Last of the Wampanoags" opened onstage in 1829 and took the country by storm, being one of the most popular plays of the first half of the century. "Metamora" was based on Metacomet, but depicted him as a noble and patriotic, yet tragic figure who fought for the freedom of his people. The play opened the year before the Indian Removal Act was passed in Congress, and some felt that it was an attempt to influence public attitudes towards the legislation.
  
  (A digression: I live less than 100 miles from Metamora, Indiana, a township named after the play in 1838. That gives some idea of the play's popularity)
  
  It's a war few present day Americans know about. The struggles against the Western Plains nations captured the American imagination. King Philip's war took place a full two hundred years before Custer was killed at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, but we remember Custer...and there have been at least 30 Hollywood movies made about him or featuring him as a supporting character. Yet in Custer's time a great many Americans were familiar with King Philip's War, in no small part because of the play "Metamora". It's possible that Custer had even seen it.
  
  It's an excellent book for a scholarly work--not at all dry--and I recommend it for the prepared reader.
• 
  Judith

  A remarkable history of a war I had never heard of, including its origins and the aftermath. The war is King Philip's War, a war between Algonquian Indians in New England against the Puritan colonists. The war began in 1675 and ended in 1676, and was the bloodiest war in the history of the country, on both sides.
  
  Lepore takes us from the beginnings of relations between English colonists to approximately the present day. She traces how white Americans felt about their Native neighbors in the early days of living side-by-side - initially there was a feeling of superiority over the Spanish because the English would never be so brutal - to how the English later clung to their Englishness and their fear of losing it - to an outright sense of righteousness because to be English was to be better - to how the English colonists during the war justified their behavior while condemning that of the Algonquians, although the two sides both committed atrocities.
  
  King Philip was the name given to a sachem of the Algonquians, an interpretation of the Indian name. He was also known by other names, most notably Metamora. He resisted the efforts of the English to convert him to Christianity and openly mocked the colonists for their religion. The beginning of the war came from a perceived betrayal that may not have occurred. Once begun it was horrendous, and both sides suffered great losses. The English lost their property, their homes, their livestock, along with many lives. The Algonquians similarly lost whole villages, including all inhabitants.
  
  The death of Metamora spelled the end of the war, and this end was immortalized in many writings, from priests condemning the heathens to former captives of the Indians.
  
  Over the years, the tone of histories of the war shifted. One hundred years later there was some sympathy for the Natives, especially notable in a popular melodramatic play of the day - Metamora. In this play Metamora was brave and strong yet doomed. The play, in a way, represented the popular view that the Natives were a noble race that had, in effect, lived past its time. They were rightly relegated to the back of the line, leading to the infamous Trail of Tears, a relocation instigated by President Jackson.
  
  The history is as much about perceptions as about actual events. It might even be considered a history of racism in this country, in some respects. There is incredible detail and hundreds of citations that go into the work. I didn't always find it easy to read, as Lepore was careful to set out the record with many illustrations.
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  Kyle Sullivan

  Simply an extraordinary book. The author commands the subject with fine-tuned detail and targeted ruminations that have a direct line of input with what US nationalism is and with what the nature of all wars everywhere, across time, might be. Wars are a contest of blood, yes, but importantly a contest of narratives.
  
  King Phillip's War was immediately a war of combative worldviews. The invaders, English people highly animated by a particular version of Christianity, sought to justify their occupation of someone else's land and then justify the reactions to that occupation in a way that places English and European cultures at the center of their cultural world. Racism, as we understand it, was being born in this period. The Algonquian nations, whose cultures and nationhoods were increasingly invaded and eroded, sought to carve out an independent, traditional space in an America that they knew was changing. And their tactics reveal that they both understood their enemy and misunderstood them at the same time. This is especially true for the English, who sought to define their English-ness against the mistakes of Spanish colonialism and the perceived barbarity of Native America.
  
  But controlling the narrative of a war isn't enough, because as the memory of the war fades, new meanings, new definitions are added. And most of those new meanings and definitions are unexpected. How King Philip's War intersects with US Nationality and myth-building is perhaps the most surprising aspect to this war that never quite ended. How the war came to define the savagery of British tactics in the American Revolution, how it came to be used to celebrate US culture-as-native in order to define American-ness against the British after the Revolution, how it got turned into one of the most popular stage plays in the history of the country, one which celebrated one particular view of Native America at a time of Indian Removal and Jacksonian racism...all of this shows that the narrative has many, conflicting storytellers. A war is an unwieldy set of meanings, and a nationality doubly so.
  
  Jill Lepore is amazing. Her abilities to weave the story successfully sells the mind-boggling twists and turns of this war and its narratives from over 400 years ago until the present day. I will be reading the rest of her popular writing.
  
  
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  Darrell Keller

  A particularly well-written history of the oft-forgotten King Philip's War. When discussing this event with my students, I have to be careful not to pass over it too quickly, less the student's fail to grasp just how harrowing this event was to the people who had to endure it. This book brings into focus the motivations and fears of the colonials and the events that forced them to live in fear of the inevitable attacks by the Wompanoags and Nipmucks, among others. To understand the savagery of this war, Lepore writes in great detail what the colonists witnessed being done to their neighbors, families, and friends. The gut-spilling horror of finding a neighbor with his Bible stuffed in his recently opened belly, the finding of Indian necklaces made from the fingers of fellow Englishmen and women, the fear of having one's scalp cut from the top of their skull and then having your brains dashed from your head, to the fear of captivity... all are detailed in this magnificent book. The subsequent events in the century following the war were eye-opening. I did not know that a follow-on play in the 1830's called Metamora had brought the events of the war to the stage. For the most part, it was well-received (maybe not in Georgia or Alabama), but it did change the perspective a little - in light of Washington Irving's revisionism perhaps - that Metacom (King Philip) was the hero, not the villain. This would be a turnaround of opinion that would, undoubtedly, horrify the colonists who lived through the events of the war - certainly it would horrify those that did NOT survive it.
  
  All in all, a terrific read about a subject that almost everyone has forgotten, if they ever learned about it at all.
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  Laura Cunningham

  A thoughtful account and analysis of America's bloodiest war per capita. Lepore does an excellent job demonstrating how King Phillip's War shaped--or even defined--American identities both native and white, and how it has lingered everywhere and nowhere in the American psyche. The book unpacks how wars are interpreted by their winners and Lepore places heavy emphasis on the written word. I would have enjoyed seeing more examples of visual and material culture (beyond print culture) but I understand a central thesis of the book revolves around a settler-colonial fixation on literacy/language. In my opinion, the final section of the book "Memory" was the most compelling, however, there is one piece of evidence I was expecting to find (based on my familiarity with the subject) that Lepore seems to have overlooked or edited out: the 1880 four-volume tome "The Memorial History of Boston" which dedicates more than one chapter to the "vanishing Indian" and is culturally significant as it is arguably Boston's competing answer (in print) to the 1876 Centennial Celebration. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned much from Lepore's insights.
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  Vel Veeter

  I've mentioned before that if you're not from New England (I am not) the amount of New England history you get (at least in other parts of the US) is relatively limited. Here's a case of where even within New England the history of this war is relatively untold, told from one specific direction, and plenty is misunderstood. Using recent poststructuralist thinking to guide her, Jill Lepore to find ways to narrate the history of this war, while discussing the specific difficulties contained in the process. It's almost a case-study in contemporary history, while also being a history writing project on its own.
  
  The book opens with a discussion on the naming of the war, and the naming of wars in general. Naming is already a loaded concept within history, within literature, within geopolitics. For example, in the US, we're treated a dual naming system whenever we study the Civil War as so many battles of that war were named differently by each side. It's not true of all the battles, but it does help to see where perspective plays into it. Whether you're talking about Manassas/Bull Run or Antietam/Sharpsburg, you have to acknowledge that who's doing the telling matters. She goes on to mention several further examples.
  
  She also spends a lot of time looking at the wealth of written material about the war, but is constantly reminding us that it's all from New England writers. She uses this as well as other methods of investigation to show how difficult approaching an "objective" (something she's not actually concerned about) telling of this history is.
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  Myles

  I wish Jill Lepore could write the history of everything! In a sense, that's what she does with these dense, dutifully, EXHAUSTIVELY conceived essays, which take various strains of the King Philip's War story as points of departure for more universal concerns. She is obsessed with how we create and alter cultural identities through storytelling, memory keeping, adaptations, religious doctrine, political exploitation, and all the self-preserving behaviors we adopt when we're uncomfortable confronting how similar we are to the people we've chosen to hate.
  
  This was a slow read not because it ever fails to captivate-- vivid accounts of brutality and prejudice rarely put me to sleep-- but because it's so incisive and the depths of its research are so marvelous that you dread the day when you've run out of pages.