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

Author - Jill Lepore ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Vintage was reviewed on 18-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Vintage. I recently read this book for a Colonial American History class and unfortunately had to write a paper on it. I would never have read it otherwise. Lepore´s thesis argued that the language and words of war are used to create the identity of a group of people.
It is possible for an historian to analyze and interpret primary documents and form an arguement without exposing an apparent bias against a group or groups of people. Lepore failed in this aspect. As her arguement unfolded, the negative views against the Puritans were clearly present from her remarks concerning the Mathers to the stripping of the Puritan´s cultural background.

While this book is not necessarily about King Philip´s War, it is filled with gore. So if you would like a literary treatment of bloody massacres or if revisionist history is your preference, read this book. If not, find something else.¤

2) Paperback Book The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Vintage. In 1675, the Wampanoag and Nipmuck people, led by a sachem identified as King Philip, went to war against the encroaching settlements of the English in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The war, which lasted just a year, was the bloodiest and most destructive, per capita of the populations on both sides, in American history, not even excluding the Civil War. By the time King Philip was slain and the Wampanoags routed, roughly half the English settlements west of Boston had been devastated. It was arguably the last war in America in which the Indians had a "fighting chance" in terms of matched forces, and it has been seen as the prototype of later efforts by powerful "chiefs" to forge an effective tribal coalition against Anglo-American invasion, notably the efforts of Pontiac, Tecumseh, Red Cloud, and Sitting Bull. As in those later instances, the English colonists gained their victory with the help of Indian allies, whom they promptly treated with more or less the same callous severity as the enemies. King Philip´s War was a breaking point in the New Englanders´ efforts to live side-by-side with the previous inhabitants of the land, priding themselves on bringing the benefits of mutual trade and Christian salvation. Prior to 1675, Puritan elites had professed the desire for such co-existence and had derided the cruelty of Catholic Spaniards in their conquest and enslavement of Indians. At least some colonists had made strenuous efforts to convert the Indians to Christianity by persuasion. After 1675 and for the long duration of westward expansion, most missionary activities followed conquest.

It´s important to remember that in 1675 the English had been permanently residing in Massachusetts for 55 years. A girl child born in Plymouth might well have had a third generation grandchild, or more likely a score of grandchildren, gathered at her knees in 1675. The initial Puritan settlement had occupied lands depopulated by diseases, and had been tolerated or even welcomed by the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit. King Philip, whose childhood name was Metacomet, was the younger son of that very Massasoit.

The Name of War, however, is not an account of King Philip´s War. In fact, it takes from granted a considerable previous knowledge of New England historiography. Instead, Jill Lepore has written a speculative meditation on the semiotics of war, especially inter-cultural war, and on the implications of King Philip´s War for the self-perception of Americans of later generations. What Lepore attempts is a post-modernist examination of the contemporary accounts of the war - a close reading of such accounts in terms of Derrida´s epistomology and Lacan´s psychology - with apologies for the futility of trying to recover an "Indian" perspective on the same events. Lepore sees the accounts of "treachery" and the racial rhetoric of the war as being of greater lasting impact on American identity than the destruction and the many acts of cruelty by both sides.

Post-modernist history is an acquired taste, as unappealing to some as raw sea-urchin entrails or heavy metal pop music. The responses of readers who have given this book one- or two-star reviews are revealing; many lovers of traditional narrative history will detest this book. Those who view American history through red-white-and-blue lenses may also find it unpalatable, since it affirms the victimhood of the Indians in an unequal struggle, with only the victors equipped to shape perception for their own advantage. Thus I have to warn you, oh potential reader: if you have no idea who Derrida and Lacan are, if you are annoyed by picking-apart of images and vivisection of ideas, this book is NOT for you. But if you are ready to confront Jill Lepore´s formidable knowledge of sources and to practice the art of reading as a two-way dialogue, from which no final interpretation is to be expected, then you´ll find this Bancroft-winning book well worth your attention.

A few days later: Thinking about this book and the comments my review elicited, I feel that I may have ´damped´ it with faint praise. It´s a book that gets better as you read deeper into it, and much better as you reflect on it. There´s an excellent chapter on the legality and morality, in pan-European thought, of the selling of Indians to the island colonies as slaves, for that it precisely what happened to hundreds of the Wamapnoags and even larger numbers of supposedly Christianized Indians after the war. Even Philip´s nine-year-old son was sold as a slave after months of debate about the justice of hanging him. Also there´s a strong exposition of the thoughts of the Spanish writers Francisco Victoria and Bartolome de las Casas, of their possible influence on the thinking of New Englanders including John Eliot, and an analysis of why Eliot´s defense of the Indians was whisked aside while Victoria and las Casas were widely studied. I´m afraid I allowed my pique at the postmodernist manner to distract me from the true substance of this book.¤

3) Paperback Book The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Vintage. 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.¤

4) Paperback Book The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Vintage. Lepore makes much of the fact that the history of King Philip´s War was written by the victors. That is not much of an insight -- victors always write the histories. But she goes one step further, it seems to me, by attempting to demonize literacy -- whether it´s the literacy of the English or that attained by John Sassamon. This is a curious stance for a writer to take. As for the non-linear nature of her narrative, I didn´t find that to be a drawback.¤

5) Paperback Book The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Vintage. One of the most interesting, thought-provoking books I have read. The scholarship is impressive, the prose lucid, the presentation of a conflict that has more than two sides is commendably fair. The book is a real eye-opener. And it has the excitement of a detective story, as Lepore tracks changes in white American attitudes toward native Americans through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. I read this alongside Philbrick´s recent bestseller Mayflower, which gives a very good running accout of King Philip´s War, and look forward to reading other books about this crucial time in the country´s history, a time when piety and violence started their enduring relationship.¤

6) Paperback Book The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Vintage. 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 in our 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.


From the Hardcover edition.¤

7) Paperback Book The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Vintage. In 1675, tensions between Native Americans and colonists residing in New England erupted into the brutal conflict that has come to be known as King Philip´s War, named after Philip, the leader of the Wampanoag Indians. Jill Lepore´s book is an evocative and insightful study of America´s recollection and understanding of one of the bloodiest wars to take place on its soil.

Lepore, an assistant professor of history at Boston University, 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. An underlying theme of her narrative is that this unfortunate battle only served to strengthen the boundaries of cultural difference between the Native Americans and colonists, setting a rigid foundation for the many years of enmity between Indians and Anglos that would ensue.

Skillfully drawing on accounts of substance from participants on both sides, Lepore presents a balanced overview of the causes and effects of this conflict and the reverberations it would have over the centuries to follow, ultimately revealing that how a past event is interpreted is often just as important as the event itself.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 15-Nov-2008, 03757026289780375702624, 000-500-280-280-070-670-600-310-8

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