In the course of a long and distinguished ministry in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the Reverend William Hubbard published two sermons, jointly authored a tract in defense of orthodox Congregational church polity, and wrote in quick succession two books of history. The first of these, Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England ... (1677), deals primarily with King Philip's War of 1676-1677, the most recent New World crisis and a matter of grave curiosity on both sides of the Atlantic. This book was republished six times before Samuel Drake's "definitive" edition of 1865, and it was dubbed "an American classic" by Moses Coit Tyler in 1878. Hubbard's second and more ambitious work, A General History of New England from the Discovery to MDCLXXX, which remained unpublished until 1815 (133 years after Hubbard is thought to have finished it), purportedly illuminates the whole of New England's past but actually focuses only on the years from...