Jill Lepore's King Philip's War
The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American IdentityOur history books continue to present our country's story in conventional patriotic terms. America being settled by courageous, white colonists who tamed a wilderness and the savages in it. With very few exceptions our society depicts these people who actually first discovered America and without whose help the colonists would not have survived, as immoral, despicable savages who needed to be removed by killing and shipping out of the country into slavery. In her book, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, Jill Lepore tells us there was another side to the story of King Philip's War. She goes beyond the actual effects of the war to discuss how language, literacy, and privilege have had lasting effects on the legacy that followed it.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, the bloodiest battle in America history, in proportion to population it was also the deadliest war in American history. The English colonists wished to rid the country of the Indians in order to seiz
Unlike most textbooks taking a one-sided perspective from the English or colonial perspective, Lepore exaggerates how much the Indian perspective needs hearing. The Indians' illiteracy placed them at a severe disadvantage because their experiences from King Philip's War were not recorded, and if they were no documentation has ever been discovered. In June of 1675, King Philip, called Metacom by the Indians, led the Wampanoag, Algonquin, Nipmunk, and Narragansett Indians in massive attacks against the English in Plymouth, Massachusetts. By the time that King Philip was shot, the allied Indian nations had destroyed more than half the English settlements in New England. They used their advantage of literacy to cast the war into words; to write about the war and use images and stories which favored themselves and to depict the Indians as cruel, non-human savages. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**. General devastation was so widespread, the other losses practically forced the colonists to leave New England wholesale. The Indians were understandably angered by the colonists' insensitive actions, especially since they had treated the English kindly when they first arrived on the Eastern shores. The English took their land and disrupted their traditional systems of trade and agriculture. Records of a decapitation of a Narragansett specifically describes that the Mohegans "delighted" at watching the killing. The tensions between these two groups were primarily based on a fear of their changing identities. Written words in American textbooks prolong the continuous strife's that Native Americans have against the English and vice versa. The Algonquin Indians worried that they were becoming like the Europeans because they had taken to wearing Western clothes, living in houses, and reading the bible. As a result, the power of native religious leaders was corrupted.
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