King Philip's War : The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict - Hardcover

Eric B. Schultz; Michael J. Tougias

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0881504343 ISBN 13: 9780881504347

Publisher: Countryman Pr, 1999

Synopsis

An ambitious work that details the events of the little-known King Philip's War, a two-year Indian rebellion that reduced many of New England's settlements to ashes and marked a crucial turning point in the battle for control of land in the New World. At the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving in 1621, chief among the honored guests was Massasoit, the sachem of the Wampanoag. Fifty-five years later, in 1676, colonial soldiers would walk through Plymouth with their horrible spoils of war: the severed head of Massasoit's son, King Philip, on a stake. Philip had just been shot at the end of a bloody conflict in which at least 10 percent of the colonists had been killed and half their towns destroyed. The Native Americans suffered even more in their pivotal struggle against the English. Less than a generation after King Philip's death, devastated by disease and famine and thousands slain or sold into slavery, the native peoples of New England were all but gone. Three hundred years later, their fight for freedom is all but erased from the history books. King Philip's Indian War provides insight into a dark and formative period of America's past, being both an in-depth history and a guide to the sites where the great ambushes, raids, and bloody battles took place. What the colonists learned from the native warriors in the swamps and woods of New England would prove invaluable in their own fight for freedom 100 years later, and the colonist's retaliation for the war would become the model for how Americans would treat Native Americans for the next three centuries. Includes first-person accounts by Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Church, and Captain Wheeler.

About this title

Review:

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

About the Author:

Eric B. Schultz has been researching and reconstructing the events of King Philip's War since 1990, an all-consuming project that has made him an expert on the subject. Educated at Brown and Harvard, he is the chairman of an information software company. He lives in Boxford, Massachusetts. Michael Tougias is the author of eleven books about New England, including Until I Have No Country, an historical novel set during King Philip's War. His other books include Exploring the Hidden Charles and New England Wild Places. He lives in Franklin, Massachusetts. The authors lecture regularly about King Philip's War at historical societies around New England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Countryman Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0881504343
• ISBN 13: 9780881504347
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416