Perspective

Jill Lepore, the author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, is a professor of American history and chair of the History and Literature program at Harvard University and writers for The New Yorker. The Name of War won the Bancroft Prize. Thus, Lepore is a high-ranking professional historian, with the standard perspective that one might expect. Lepore is quite hard on the colonists, though not due to their religiosity. Instead, she criticizes their hypocrisy with respect to the Indians. First, the colonists thought the Indians were human enough to try and convert but not human enough to treat as equals; she sees this as a deep inconsistency. Further, the colonists liked to contrast how civilized they were compared to the barbarism of the Spanish Conquistadors; but during King Philip's War they seemed to be at least almost as brutal and...