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

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.Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

An evocative, powerful, and troubling book about a little-known war that speaks to all wars. —The New Republic

Brilliant. . . . Lepore's grasp of the complexities and varieties of the human beings in her drama matches that of a fine novelist. . . . This is history as it should be written.   —The Boston Globe

Fascinating . . . rich in imagination, in moral ruminations about the meaning and justice of war.   —The New York Review of Books

“Jill Lepore has written a brilliant study of the different ways Amerlc‚