The Pen is Mightier than the Sword

Abstract

Jill Lepore's subject is history itself: the chronicling, explaining, justifying, memorializing, and even fictionalizing of King Philip's War (1675-1678) and of war in general. Thickly researched, original, contemporary, and disturbing, The Name of War also belongs to an ambitious American studies tradition that seeks to find sweeping meaning, nothing less than the origins of American identity, in American letters. Lepore delves deeply, too, into the history of the book. She dabbles in the history of commemoration and of the body. Laced with such scholarly apparatus as discursive endnotes, time lines, and graphs (all of them useful), this book is, nonetheless, a self-consciously speculative history. The writing is generally brilliant. The arguments, if not always convincing, are always interesting and often provocative. Lepore's first seven chapters analyze works produced in England and New England during and in the generation that followed the war. Lepore finds and carefully teases meaning out of the few words written by Indians that survive (pp. 94-96). For there were literate Indians in New England; Lepore's figures indicate that among Christian Indians the literacy rate may have been as startlingly high as that among colonial women (pp. 36-37). But though one Indian was a printer, and may even have set the type for Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, none left a war narrative. Instead, the war produced a stream of colonial and English print; twenty-one separate accounts were published before 1685. Examining these works along with many unpublished writings, Lepore contends that the sheer violence of King Philip's War intensified the settlers' fears of losing their Englishness. This is why they especially abhorred the nakedness and homelessness wrought by the war and why they became increasingly uneasy with Indians in English dress or in English-style towns. This is why they ruthlessly removed Indians from their presence: incarcerating their allies on disease-ridden Deer Island, driving survivors underground, and exporting as slaves captured enemy Indians, women and