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The Battle of Bloody Brook, September 18th, 1675 |
In the late 1990s historians became re-interested in writing about seventeenth century New England's bloodiest conflict: King Philip's War (1675-1676). In 1999 alone the following books were published: Jill Lepore's The Name of War, James D. Drake's King Philip's War: Civil War in New England 1675-1676, and finally, the subject of this article, Schultz and Tougias' King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict.
All of these books emphasized different aspects of the war. Lepore analyzed seventeenth and eighteenth century literature on King Philip's War to show that English colonizers wrote of it in a way that exonerated themselves of the violence they committed against Native Americans. Drake looked to the decades prior to the war, arguing that colonizers and Indians built a shared society that King Philip's War dismantled.
Schultz and Tougias wrote a more granular analysis of the war itself. Part one of the book provides a chronological account of the war's individual battles, part two performs something akin to microhistory in more deeply investigating sites and battlefields important to the war (and grappling with locals' flawed understanding of the history), and part three provides some primary sources used to create the book.