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A review by analyticali
The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore
4.0
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.
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.