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

Lepore’s book has been widely praised and well received, including winning the prestigious Bancroft Prize, so its reputation is well established. The purpose of this review is to present a more critical assessment. This is important because there are substantial and important problems in this book which should be recognized, both for potential readers of the book and for those who have read it but feel vaguely dissatisfied with it.A first but crucial point is, if you are looking for a history of King Phillip’s War, this is not the book. It does not attempt to provide a historical overview of the events that led up to the war, the nature of the battles, the way the war was fought, or the eventual outcome. It does not discuss the causes, the events, or the consequences of the war in any systematic way. Lepore does touch on many of these subjects, but that is not her interest here. If you want a good general history of the war, you will have to look elsewhere.What then is her particular interest and approach? Lepore’s work (published in 1998) belongs to a school of thought that dominated the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s (but is apparently beginning to disappear), in which the focus of study was increasingly texts rather than things; the realm of language, representation, symbols and words, rather than the external world in its concrete reality. The very title of book, ‘The Name of War’, is indicative of her interest more in names than in things. Her interest is not so much in what happened during the war, but in how the colonists ‘represented’ the events, and how they ‘constructed’ their own identity as English through these representations. Thus the book is throughout more concerned with the way people interpreted the war, rather than about the war itself.Indeed, Lepore repeatedly suggests that the ‘writing’ of a war (i.e. what she is doing) is just as important as the ‘waging’ of a war. The second sentence of her book declares: ‘Writing about war can be almost as difficult as waging it.’ She repeatedly comes back to this point: “writing about war” is as critical as “waging it,” and war is a “contest of both injuries and interpretation.” Now putting aside the self-serving aspect of this equivalence (does Lepore think she deserves a medal of valor for her courage in writing about war?), this is yet another indication of the postmodern tendency to substitute texts for reality. War, she writes, ‘is a contest of words as much as it is a contest of wounds.'The book in the end is not so much about King Philip’s War as it is about the way it expresses a contest of meanings and identities rather than an actual brutal physical contest (indeed the last chapter is largely about 19th century stage dramas telling the story of King Phillip). Her interest is in ‘contested identities’, in ‘subtle maneuverings of language and memory,’ about ‘shifting conceptions of identity.’ Remarkably, she claims that the ‘most salient features’ of the war were the concerns about English identity (as if the death, maiming, food shortages, torture, vast destruction of property were rather less salient than identity politics!).Lepore starts and ends the book with a chilling description of the way Mohegan Indians slowly torture to death their enemy, a Narragansett Indian. Now one might think that this appalling cruelty and unbearable pain is the most salient thing about this event. But not for Lepore. For her, the event is important for its symbolic significance: the torture “serves as a metaphor for the elaborate maneuverings” by which the English preserved their cultural identity by defining themselves against Indians (I doubt that this is the way the person being tortured saw it!). Similarly, when colonists are skinned alive by Indians, what Lepore takes away from this is the symbolic significance of this form of grotesque “nakedness” as a commentary on the distinction of identity between English and Indian. What interests Lepore is texts, symbols, meanings, representations, and language, not the physical bloodshed, pain, and wounds of war.As another example, take her discussion of the famous captivity of Mary Rowlandson among the Indians. Rather than discuss the actual events of her capture and captivity with the Indians, Lepore’s concern is rather with (over)analyzing the many subtle shades of meaning in the word ‘redemption’ as used in Rowlandson’s narrative, or the way her phrases “swell with ambiguity.” Once again, Lepore’s interest is in texts rather than things, words rather than events, representations rather than reality (as well as a fascination with finding paradoxes and contradictions in peoples’ constructions of reality).Lepore has a full chapter on the question of just cause and the laws of war, including a discussion of 17th century theories of war, legitimacy of tactics in war, etc. Many if not most readers will want her to discuss whether this war was justified or not by either side (and whether the tactics were violations of the rules of war). Yet oddly she wholly avoids the question, being interested (predictably) instead simply in how each side “represented” the other and constructed their own identities in response to the other. One suspects this reticence has to do with another recent academic trend, that of moral relativism. This is her approach throughout the book: a refusal to take sides on any moral issues, and a facile insistence that both sides committed atrocities and both believed they were in the right, so there’s no way to judge between them. This is not to suggest that there was a clear right and wrong side in this war, but only that most readers will want at least some discussion of this important moral question. Instead, for her it all comes down to language: “the chief difference between English and Indian ‘cruelties’ was simply the words they used to describe them.”Some people will like this sort of approach. But you will need to look elsewhere if you want a book that is about the war itself, not about textual representations of the war and fascination with the “illusion of stable meanings”.

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).

I liked the Quality of the Book Itself, and its double cover. Not much other than I hope to find the time and spill the wine and get into this book. I'm going to try and not go on any path during this stroll down Elm St.

Wow! I have read numerous books on King Philip’s War, as well as books on that era in New England, and I want to give author Jill Lepore a big historical as well as cultural hug for her excellent work!I am descended from a few of the characters that she mentions on the colonial side, including one of the men and his son who triggered the war and were killed the next day…… and, also, my great grand uncle was Capt. Benjamin Church.So, I have been to many of the war’s battle sites and historical places.I see that there are some critics in this thread who seem to lambaste Lepore for this not being a history of that war, but she never intended it to be and that was made clear.Instead it is a larger view of the events as they took place at the time but on a bigger scale how they have affected the American psyche ever since then.After all I have read about this terrible era of conflict (that occurred after 50 years of peace since the Mayflower landed), this is a refreshing and welcome perspective and a must read especially for those who have already read many of the day by day details of this war.

Beautiful Thank You