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 enlarge | Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 18167
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0375702628
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN: 9780375702624
ASIN: 0375702628
Publication Date: April 27, 1999
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| Customer Reviews:
 how we came to be us June 26, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
One of the most interesting, thought-provoking books I have read. The scholarship is impressive, the prose lucid, the presentation of a conflict that has more than two sides is commendably fair. The book is a real eye-opener. And it has the excitement of a detective story, as Lepore tracks changes in white American attitudes toward native Americans through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. I read this alongside Philbrick's recent bestseller Mayflower, which gives a very good running accout of King Philip's War, and look forward to reading other books about this crucial time in the country's history, a time when piety and violence started their enduring relationship.
 a misleading polemic, not a history November 25, 2006
23 out of 35 found this review helpful
It's said that the second historian was the first revisionist. In other words, to some extent any and every telling of history reveals as much about the historian as it does the history. But for as much as the telling of history is always interpretive, it is also entirely possible for an historian to confront, recognize, and largely neutralize her own interpretive biases; while she need not abandon or apologize for her point of view, nevertheless it is her responsibility to present all the relevant historical facts -- especially those that might cast doubt upon her interpretations and agendas -- and then argue her case with all of the relevant information on the table. That is the difference between interpretive history and deceptive or misleading polemic.
Lepore accomplishes only polemic here, then, in that she presents as supporting evidence for her biases only her own highly questionable interpretations of the semantics of the colonists' own writings on King Philip's War. She is hermeneutically daft, asserting a self-contained truth within those writings that is simply absurd. Texts (especially in the case of the very personal diary entries, private letters, and firsthand accounts that constitute the overwhelming majority of the colonists' writings on King Phillip's War) do not and cannot contain some absolute, inescapable meaning that imposes itself upon the reader. Texts communicate their real meaning only when referred to the indigenous contexts (social, political, religious, philosophical, linguistic, psychological, etc.) that produced them; when removed from those contexts and read in ignorance of them, the reader must of necessity substitute the contexts and agendas of her own experience for the authentic contexts, so that the texts will appear to have radically different meanings than they really do -- they will seem to mean whatever the interpreter wants them to mean.
And what does Lepore want the Puritans' writings to mean? What is her agenda here? Essentially, it is portray the Puritan colonists of 17th century Massachusetts as despicable hypocrites. Now, as I said, if that's her agenda and her bias, that's fine; but it is acceptable for her to present the conclusions born of that agenda and bias as history only on the condition that they are argued in light of all the evidence that might call them into question. Lepore fails on this count. Again, she confines the supporting evidence she provides for her theses to her own highly speculative interpretations of the colonists' writings; as other reviewers have noted here, then, this book is much closer to deconstructionist literary criticism than it is to history. She misses the forest for the trees: she makes no attempt to check her interpretive biases against the broader historical narrative that is the context of King Phillip's War.
For example, in 1622 the natives around the Jamestown settlements in Virginia attempted to eradicate the presence of the colonists, through a surprise act of genocide that followed eight years of peaceful coexistence. The attack ultimately resulted in the deaths of two-thirds of the roughly 1200 colonists in Virginia at the time, and sent a powerful shock through the other New World colonies and their groups of sponsors across the Atlantic. The natives committed their genocide at Jamestown only two years after the Plymouth colony was founded; it is unquestionable, then, that from the earliest years onward the Massachusetts colonists' attitudes toward their native neighbors would have been colored (and rightly so) by a great deal of suspicion and mistrust in light of the knowledge of what the Virginia natives had done to the Jamestown settlers -- only fifty years before King Phillip attempted essentially the same thing. Yet Lepore never once mentions the genocide in Virginia, and does not recognize its immense significance for the relations of the English and the natives in Massachusetts fifty years later.
To name another example, Lepore offers no analysis whatsoever of the nature of the Puritan faith of the Massachusetts colonists, and how that faith affected their conduct in the war. She does mention their faith in a non-specific way, when it serves to imply a monstrous hypocrisy on the part of the colonists; but never is an astute or sympathetic understanding of their religion presented, and since the early Massachusetts colonies were communities of an almost monastic fervor, devotion, and asceticism, Lepore simply ignores an immensely important factor in their motives and reasoning during King Phillip's War. In its place, she asserts that the colonists fought to preserve their "Englishness;" in support of this idea, she presents some diary entries and editorials of the day in which the colonists wrote of their fear of becoming like the savages, should their common life in the New World continue in the direction they thought it was headed. But it seems perfectly clear to me that Lepore has grossly misinterpreted those writings. The colonists did not actually think that their assimilation into the native culture and way of life was real possibility: the warning that they might "become like the savages" was not a cultural apprehension of theirs, but rather the sort of hyperbole so often used in Christian homilies and catechisms and pastoral essays intended to exhort the faithful. The Massachusetts Puritans were not afraid of becoming Indians. They were afraid of losing their faith, losing the Christian path through life that they had sacrificed so much to preserve. They were afraid of any compromise or waning of the Christian zeal and austerity of their near-monastic lives. After all, it was in order to preserve the Christian life that they had left England in the first place, decades earlier: they had first settled in Holland after the English anathematized them, and then left for the New World when they saw their faith diluted by worldly comforts and distractions while living on the Continent. So to me, the idea that they fought the natives in King Phillip's War to defend their "Englishness" is simply preposterous. Englishness was something they had willingly left behind to purse their religion, and played no more of a role in most of their lives and motives than that of superficial, sentimental cultural orientation. I think it's deceptive for Lepore even to pose the question, "why were the English really fighting?" as though it requires some subtle expert analysis: the colonists fought the natives because the natives were trying to kill them... it's as simple as that.
There are many more examples of Lepore's highly selective consideration of the historical record, and highly questionable reasoning and interpretation. But it is not possible to argue them satisfactorily in a review such as this, of course: to respond adequately I would have to write a book of my own (as I've already made a good beginning of doing), taking Lepore point by point. One thing I'll grant her is that she presents her source material openly, with no attempt to conceal certain passages that might be interpreted any number of other ways than those she has chosen. But again, the biases and misunderstanding that a 21st century American will inevitably bring to any reading of texts produced by 17th century Puritans render any approach to understand their conduct of King Phillip's War solely by a consideration of those documents a myopic, naive, misguided effort, and doomed to failure.
 worth reading October 3, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Life in 17C North America involved war -- a brutal reality dutifully recorded from contemporary sources by the author and a very few others. It's a saga that permeates the foundation of this nation, and demands examination.
All were perpetrators, all were victims. Who was right?
This work is a valuable account of King Phillip's War (1675). Read it and judge for yourself.
Of course some of us read the book shortly after it was published in HC in 1998. Thus my remarks. I note other reviews, many critical, tie this work to completely unrelated savagery that occured after 1998. They seem to be frantically trying to revise history.
This book has nothing to do with 9/11/01. Those who interpret it as such should seek a competent analyist and a suitable drug regimen.
And this mess won a Bancroft? July 3, 2005
19 out of 34 found this review helpful
The Bancroft is the history profession's Pulitzer, so I was looking forward to being edified. What I got instead was an impenetrable tome consisting mainly of fashionable deconstructionist babble about how war is defined among different cultures. I read and read and never found a coherent narrative about what this war was supposed to be about or what it had to do with American identity.
Perhaps this "language of academe" impressed the Bancroft committee, itself made up of pedants, but to the common reader, whom the academy putatively serves, this thing is worthless. I have the feeling that these guys began reading, and when their eyes started to glaze over they said, "My kind of history!"
Not a history October 13, 2004
15 out of 30 found this review helpful
For those interested in the story of this war, go elsewhere. It is not here.
The book is a speculation on the motivation of participants in the cultural conflict, and its consequences. I did not like the frequent suppositions-often they seem to be a figment of the authors imagination though no doubt founded in her vast knowledge of the subject. It just doesn't hold up as an historian's analysis.
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