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, 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. ( )

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 this war created the American identity, this war waged 100 years before the American revolution.

A wonderful read. ( )

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 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. ( )

A superb study of an all-but-forgotten war that, in the author's view, had a profound effect on Anglo-American perceptions of the Indian. First-time author Lepore (History/Boston Univ.) offers an account of the bloody war in 1675 between English settlers and Algonquian Indians in New England, a ``short, vicious'' conflict that, by proportion of population, ``inflicted greater casualties than any other war in American history.'' Her account is peppered with more than the usual atrocities: Men, women, even children are tortured and murdered, whole cities burned. It is also riddled with mysteries; as Lepore notes, the war began thanks to rumor, an unsolved murder, and pent-up but vague hatreds among peoples who had become more and more like one another. The English, far from home, had adopted Native American customs and cuisine, had stopped attending church, had moved farther and farther inland and away from European settlements. The Indians, for their part, had taken to wearing Western clothes, living in houses, and reading the Bible. With identities thus confused, each side waged a war that the other condemned as brutal and savage, and thousands died in the bargain. Lepore's account of the war has the immediacy of journalism, as well as learned asides about anthropological theories of conflict, the effect of literacy on hitherto preliterate populations, the nature of ethnic strife, and, most important, the memory of King Philip's War in New England. That grim memory, she suggests, tempered later policies of war and removal. The war itself continues to resonate today as Native Americans press their claims for land first lost in the conflict's aftermath. ``In the end, this book is just another story about just another war,'' Lepore writes, with wholly undue modesty. Vivid and thoughtful, it is much more than that, and it holds the promise of much good work to come.

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: 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). ( )