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Book: The Name of War by Jill Lepore
Jun. 20th, 2008 09:19 amThe Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity is all about a colonist/Native American conflict in Massachusetts in the1670s. Once again, I'm left wondering whether I somehow slept through high school history (despite good grades) as I don't remember hearing about this conflict before. It seems to have been a fairly significant conflict that lasted several years and cost at least a couple thousand lives.
The focus of the book isn't so much straight history as sort of psychological and cultural examination of history. I'm about halfway through, and so far there have been some really interesting bits about how the colonists wrote about the war - how they used words to define the conflict, to define their psychological reactions to the violent acts committed by them and the violent acts committed against them. I find the discussion of possible reasons why we don't have much of a contemporary Native American account of the conflict particularly interesting.
One thing I got a strong feeling of from this book so far was that identity in the 1600s seemed to be more fluid and (consequently?) more hotly contested than is usual in my culture today. The colonists are depicted as extremely concerned about triangulating their identity between the pressures of the Native American culture (lots of worries about becoming "indianized" and losing their values due to interaction with other peoples) and the Spanish colonial culture (lots of worries about seeming like a brutal inhuman Spanish conquistador, due to wide reading of the book by Bartolome de Las Casas about Spanish mistreatment of native peoples (American and Caribbean and all)). There was a keen awareness on the part of both the colonists and the native peoples that who you were was defined by what you did, how you spoke, what you ate and how you dressed and the people you spent time with. Contact between the two cultures changed both cultures, and neither culture seems to have been totally ok with this.
This book fills up my brain very quickly, but it's very enjoyable. I particularly like all the quotes that give me a vivid picture about how some 1600s English-colonist folk talked to each other and to others. I like the details about the publishing industry in the colonies and in England, and love imagining the dense traffic of letters back and forth across the Atlantic.
And I'm very convinced by the discussions of identity, narrative, and storytelling as both an extension of and a response to conflict.
The focus of the book isn't so much straight history as sort of psychological and cultural examination of history. I'm about halfway through, and so far there have been some really interesting bits about how the colonists wrote about the war - how they used words to define the conflict, to define their psychological reactions to the violent acts committed by them and the violent acts committed against them. I find the discussion of possible reasons why we don't have much of a contemporary Native American account of the conflict particularly interesting.
One thing I got a strong feeling of from this book so far was that identity in the 1600s seemed to be more fluid and (consequently?) more hotly contested than is usual in my culture today. The colonists are depicted as extremely concerned about triangulating their identity between the pressures of the Native American culture (lots of worries about becoming "indianized" and losing their values due to interaction with other peoples) and the Spanish colonial culture (lots of worries about seeming like a brutal inhuman Spanish conquistador, due to wide reading of the book by Bartolome de Las Casas about Spanish mistreatment of native peoples (American and Caribbean and all)). There was a keen awareness on the part of both the colonists and the native peoples that who you were was defined by what you did, how you spoke, what you ate and how you dressed and the people you spent time with. Contact between the two cultures changed both cultures, and neither culture seems to have been totally ok with this.
This book fills up my brain very quickly, but it's very enjoyable. I particularly like all the quotes that give me a vivid picture about how some 1600s English-colonist folk talked to each other and to others. I like the details about the publishing industry in the colonies and in England, and love imagining the dense traffic of letters back and forth across the Atlantic.
And I'm very convinced by the discussions of identity, narrative, and storytelling as both an extension of and a response to conflict.
