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A review by neoteotihuacan
The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore
5.0
Simply an extraordinary book. The author commands the subject with fine-tuned detail and targeted ruminations that have a direct line of input with what US nationalism is and with what the nature of all wars everywhere, across time, might be. Wars are a contest of blood, yes, but importantly a contest of narratives.
King Phillip's War was immediately a war of combative worldviews. The invaders, English people highly animated by a particular version of Christianity, sought to justify their occupation of someone else's land and then justify the reactions to that occupation in a way that places English and European cultures at the center of their cultural world. Racism, as we understand it, was being born in this period. The Algonquian nations, whose cultures and nationhoods were increasingly invaded and eroded, sought to carve out an independent, traditional space in an America that they knew was changing. And their tactics reveal that they both understood their enemy and misunderstood them at the same time. This is especially true for the English, who sought to define their English-ness against the mistakes of Spanish colonialism and the perceived barbarity of Native America.
But controlling the narrative of a war isn't enough, because as the memory of the war fades, new meanings, new definitions are added. And most of those new meanings and definitions are unexpected. How King Philip's War intersects with US Nationality and myth-building is perhaps the most surprising aspect to this war that never quite ended. How the war came to define the savagery of British tactics in the American Revolution, how it came to be used to celebrate US culture-as-native in order to define American-ness against the British after the Revolution, how it got turned into one of the most popular stage plays in the history of the country, one which celebrated one particular view of Native America at a time of Indian Removal and Jacksonian racism...all of this shows that the narrative has many, conflicting storytellers. A war is an unwieldy set of meanings, and a nationality doubly so.
Jill Lepore is amazing. Her abilities to weave the story successfully sells the mind-boggling twists and turns of this war and its narratives from over 400 years ago until the present day. I will be reading the rest of her popular writing.
King Phillip's War was immediately a war of combative worldviews. The invaders, English people highly animated by a particular version of Christianity, sought to justify their occupation of someone else's land and then justify the reactions to that occupation in a way that places English and European cultures at the center of their cultural world. Racism, as we understand it, was being born in this period. The Algonquian nations, whose cultures and nationhoods were increasingly invaded and eroded, sought to carve out an independent, traditional space in an America that they knew was changing. And their tactics reveal that they both understood their enemy and misunderstood them at the same time. This is especially true for the English, who sought to define their English-ness against the mistakes of Spanish colonialism and the perceived barbarity of Native America.
But controlling the narrative of a war isn't enough, because as the memory of the war fades, new meanings, new definitions are added. And most of those new meanings and definitions are unexpected. How King Philip's War intersects with US Nationality and myth-building is perhaps the most surprising aspect to this war that never quite ended. How the war came to define the savagery of British tactics in the American Revolution, how it came to be used to celebrate US culture-as-native in order to define American-ness against the British after the Revolution, how it got turned into one of the most popular stage plays in the history of the country, one which celebrated one particular view of Native America at a time of Indian Removal and Jacksonian racism...all of this shows that the narrative has many, conflicting storytellers. A war is an unwieldy set of meanings, and a nationality doubly so.
Jill Lepore is amazing. Her abilities to weave the story successfully sells the mind-boggling twists and turns of this war and its narratives from over 400 years ago until the present day. I will be reading the rest of her popular writing.