by Jill Lepore
USA, 1998
Badmouthed in a number of unintentionally funny Amazon 1-star reviews for being not linear, "not scholarly," "post-modern" and (my favorite) "stridently anti-Christian," Harvard historian Jill Lepore's 1999 Bancroft Prize winner The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity is quite simply one of the most provocative and compelling pieces of history writing that I've come across in the last couple of years. Great stuff. Taking a thematic rather than a chronological approach to her topic, Lepore looks at the bloody 1675-1676 conflict between Algonquian Indians (headed by the Wampanoag leader "King Philip") and British colonists in New England to wrestle with the idea that the war of words in the event's telling and retelling was just as important as the atrocity-ridden war itself in terms of defining a new colonial identity. Although I was surprised by how much I ended up enjoying what occasionally reads like a disquisition on cruelty, I probably shouldn't have been given Lepore's skill at interrogating her sources and the vibrancy of her prose. Ironically, in a work in which the primacy of language takes center stage throughout--from Increase Mather's soul-searching May 1676 question "Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us when his displeasure is written in such visible and bloody characters?" (69) to distraught colonist Edward Wharton's assertion that the war's ravages had left English lands "a burdensome and menstruous cloth" (73) and on to a lengthy discussion about how colonial leaders were eventually able to rationalize a policy of extermination or enslavement against "inhuman" native neighbors they had once wanted to "save"--one of Lepore's most potent sequences is visual rather than language-oriented in nature: the revelation that the vanquished Philip's head was left to rot atop a flagpole in Plymouth for decades after the war. Whether that be your idea of Christian justice or not, I found The Name of War to be a fascinating and complex look at a confrontation model that would be repeated again and again in later U.S. history and just an exhilarating example of close reading by an historian at the top of her game. Bring it. (www.randomhouse.com/vintage)
Jill Lepore
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