BANCROFF PRIZE WINNER - King Philip's War, the excruciating racial
war--colonists against Indigenous peoples--that erupted in New England
in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American
history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides
were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."
The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against
accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear
that it was after the war--and because of it--that the boundaries
between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King
Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history,
and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings
that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indigenous
peoples and Anglos.
Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American
conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled
us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important
in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.