Our history books continue to present our country's story in conventional patriotic terms. America being settled by courageous, white colonists who tamed a wilderness and the savages in it. With very few exceptions our society depicts these people who actually first discovered America and without whose help the colonists would not have survived, as immoral, despicable savages who needed to be removed by killing and shipping out of the country into slavery. In her book, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, Jill Lepore tells us there was another side to the story of King Philip's War. She goes beyond the actual effects of the war to discuss how language, literacy, and privilege have had lasting effects on the legacy that followed it.

In 1675, tensions between Native Americans and colonists residing in New England erupted into the brutal conflict that has come to be known as King Philip's War, the bloodiest battle in America history, in proportion to population it was also the deadliest war in American history. The English colonists wished to rid the country of the Indians in order to seiz

In June of 1675, King Philip, called Metacom by the Indians, led the Wampanoag, Algonquin, Nipmunk, and Narragansett Indians in massive attacks against the English in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The English colonists allied with the Mohegan, Pequot, Mohawk, and Christian Indians and fought back. There were organized raids back and forth which resulted in thousands of murders. On both sides, women and children were killed, tortured, and the survivors sold to slavery.

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Lepore takes an insightful look at how the colonists distanced themselves from their cruelty. They used their advantage of literacy to cast the war into words; to write about the war and use images and stories which favored themselves and to depict the Indians as cruel, non-human savages. During the time of King Philip's War, most of the male colonists were literate. The majority of the Indians were not because for Indians to learn to read and write they would have had to make cultural changes such as adopting English ways and living in an English-speaking town. The Indians' illiteracy placed them at a severe disadvantage because their experiences from King Philip's War were not recorded, and if they were no documentation has

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Approximate Word count = 861
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)