Product Description

King Philip's War--one of America's first and costliest wars--began in 1675 as an Indian raid on several farms in Plymouth Colony, but quickly escalated into a full-scale war engulfing all of southern New England. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #162855 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.com
Now largely forgotten, the massacres of 1675 to 1676, known as King Philip's War, ended the harmonious relations that had existed between native Americans and the colonists since their arrival at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Tensions had been rising as the number of settlers grew, and the pillaging of an outlying farm by affronted young braves escalated into open hostilities. Pitched battles were fought from Rhode Island to Maine. Hundreds of English died as farmers fled and cowered behind stockades or in the few port towns. Thousands of natives were slaughtered and the rest dispersed or sold into slavery in the West Indies. The savagery resulted in the clearing of the native populations from southern New England and the unopposed expansion of the New England colonies. It also became the brutal model on which the United States came to deal with its native peoples. King Philip's War tells the story with such close attention to detail that each ambush, each burned-out farm, becomes a vivid image. The authors make abundant use of maps and photographs of old sites to enable the reader to follow the course of the war: the book forms an exhaustive guide for the armchair historian or anyone wishing to visit the monuments and battlefields today. The terror and bitterness of the period live again in the book's illustrations of old woodcuts and lithographs and in quotations from contemporary narratives. That King Philip, whose head was paraded around the streets of Plymouth in a barbarous show of triumph, was the son of the Wampanoag chief who celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims in 1621 adds to the irony and tragedy of the events, whose memory this well-researched book deservedly keeps alive. --John Stevenson

From Library Journal
This work about the brutal 18th-century war between Indian tribes (led by a daring and skilled chief known as King Philip) is divided into three quite different parts. The first part provides a relatively concise chronological retelling of the war. The second part, organized geographically and the heart of the volume, takes readers through New England to various sites associated with the conflict. Frequent references to present-day localities make it possible to use these pages as a sort of historical guidebook. The third part offers three contemporary narratives reflecting the significance of the war on the people of the era. Useful maps assist the reader throughout. Although King Philip's War is little known today, the conflict has not been as ignored as the authors claim hereAwitness, for example, Jill Lepore's acclaimed The Name of War (LJ 3/1/98). However, this book does much to reestablish the conflict's importance for popular historical study of the area, making it especially useful for public libraries.ACharles K. Piehl, Mankato State Univ., MN
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Boston Globe
[E]xtensive details of the sites of all the war's encounters, creating a Baedeker for a terribly bloody dispute.