2010 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
King Philip's War was the most devastating conflict between Europeans
and Native Americans in the 1600s. In this incisive account,
award-winning author Daniel R. Mandell puts the war into its rich
historical context.
The war erupted in July 1675, after years of growing tension between
Plymouth and the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, also known as Philip.
Metacom's warriors attacked nearby Swansea, and within months the bloody
conflict spread west and erupted in Maine. Native forces ambushed
militia detachments and burned towns, driving the colonists back toward
Boston. But by late spring 1676, the tide had turned: the colonists
fought more effectively and enlisted Native allies while from the west
the feared Mohawks attacked Metacom's forces. Thousands of Natives
starved, fled the region, surrendered (often to be executed or sold into
slavery), or, like Metacom, were hunted down and killed.
Mandell explores how decades of colonial expansion and encroachments on
Indian sovereignty caused the war and how Metacom sought to enlist the
aid of other tribes against the colonists even as Plymouth pressured the
Wampanoags to join them. He narrates the colonists' many defeats and
growing desperation; the severe shortages the Indians faced during the
brutal winter; the collapse of Native unity; and the final hunt for
Metacom. In the process, Mandell reveals the complex and shifting
relationships among the Native tribes and colonists and explains why the
war effectively ended sovereignty for Indians in New England.
This fast-paced history incorporates the most recent scholarship on the
region and features nine new maps and a bibliographic essay about
Native-Anglo relations.
