The name of war [electronic resource] : Waging, writing, and remembering King Philip's War.

1995

1 online resource (423 p.)

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Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-07, Section: A, page: 2839.

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This dissertation investigates the relationship between cruelty and language in defining the cultural, racial, and political identities of the peoples of colonial New England during King Philip's War. Further, it explores how the story of that war has been resurrected by subsequent generations of Americans seeking to redefine themselves. King Philip's War was, in proportion to population, the most fatal war in American history, and it has been widely noted for its excessive brutality. Remarkable for the magnitude of its destruction, King Philip's War is almost as often remembered for how much people of the time wrote about it. Between 1675 and 1682, twenty-one narratives of the war were published in New and Old England in at least thirty separate editions. Building upon the theoretical work of scholars from several disciplines, this dissertation attempts to understand the connection between these two phenomena--the excess of cruelty on the one hand and the excess of narration on the other. It argues, ultimately, that the two are causally linked: acts of war generate acts of narration and both types of acts are essentially joined in a common purpose--that of defining a community's cultural, racial, and political identity. Close readings of the written accounts of King Philip's War demonstrate that they played a pivotal role in exacting the defeat of New England's Indians and in reaffirming the European, and especially English identity of its colonists. Meanwhile, an examination of representations of King Philip's War during the American Revolution, again, in the early republican period, and, finally, in the present day, traces the trajectory not only of American nationalism but also of American Indian identity. During the period of Indian removal, for instance, Edwin Forrest's celebrated portrayal of Philip in the popular play, Metamora, contributed to the emergence of a distinctly American national identity, but may also have contributed to a cultural revival among New England Indian groups when the play came to Boston in 1833. The story of King Philip's War, then, contains within it the story of how English colonists became American and of how New England's Indians have remained Indian.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 1995.

Yale University.