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 Jill Lepore's Scholarly Work On The Algonquin Indians Is Infused With The Immediacy Of Good Journalism. By Gregory McNamee The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, by Jill Lepore (Knopf). Cloth, $30. IF YOU ASKED a movie director to stage a film about massacres and assorted savageries involving Indians and Anglos, the chances are good that you'd find it set with a saguaro, or at least sagebrush, in the background. Jill Lepore's superb study of an all-but-forgotten war that had a profound effect on Anglo American perceptions of the Indian may change all that; henceforth, our murder-and-mayhem historical dramas may be set in the tall pines of New England, and not in the Wild West.
"In the end, this book is just another story about just
another war," Lepore writes, with wholly undue modesty. Vivid
and thoughtful, it's much more than that, and it holds the promise
of good work to come.
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Lepore, an assistant professor of history at Boston University,
offers an account of an 18-month war between English settlers
and Algonquin Indians in New England, a "short, vicious"
conflict that, by proportion of population, "inflicted greater
casualties than any other war in American history." Her heavily
documented account is peppered with more than the usual atrocities:
Men, women, even children are tortured and murdered, whole cities
burned. It's also riddled with mysteries: As Lepore writes, the
war began thanks to rumor, an unsolved murder, and pent-up but
vague hatreds among people 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 steadily
moved farther inland, away from European settlements. The Indians,
for their part, had taken to wearing clothes, living in houses,
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 reads with the immediacy of good journalism.
She also fills her pages with 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 and elsewhere--a
memory that tempered later policies of war and removal (and that
is revisited even today, as Native Americans press their claims
for land first loss in the aftermath of that war in 1675-76).
