Diary Of King Philips War

Benjamin Church liked Indians and was liked by them. He studied them, admired them, jollied them, dealt fairly with them. He saw in them splendid fighters. They saw in him a splendid captain. He knew all about the Indian's "savagery," but he is untouched by the hatred and hysteria which fills the conventional history. This is eye-witness history of the first great Indian War in North America, by the most successful guerrilla captain on the English side. Behind his homespun stories of the Pease Field Fight, the Swamp Fight, the parleys with Queen Awashonks and the pursuit of King Philip lies a collision of cultures which set a pattern for almost all future relations between white men and red men in English America. If he could have foreseen the disappearance of the Indian from every swamp and beach in New England, he would have felt saddened. This is the story of a warfare of extermination which nobody had planned; a description of sorties, ambushes, providential escapes and breath-taking victories which is written with all the immediacy and simplicity of folk art. Church's Diary of King Philip's War is one of the earliest and most graphic of American primitives.

Original ed., 1716, published under title: Entertaining passages relating to Philip's war. "First edition." Bibliography: p. 187-195. Includes index.

"With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the "First Indian War" (later named King Philip's War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. In reading seventeenth-century sources alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history, Brooks's pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England."--Jacket flap.

The harrowing story of one of America's first and costliest wars—featuring a new foreword by bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick At once an in-depth history of this pivotal war and a guide to the historical sites where the ambushes, raids, and battles took place, King Philip's War expands our understanding of American history and provides insight into the nature of colonial and ethnic wars in general. Through a careful reconstruction of events, first-person accounts, period illustrations, and maps, and by providing information on the exact locations of more than fifty battles, King Philip's War is useful as well as informative. Students of history, colonial war buffs, those interested in Native American history, and anyone who is curious about how this war affected a particular New England town, will find important insights into one of the most seminal events to shape the American mind and continent.

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.