Volume 45, Number 6 · April 9, 1998
The Bloodiest War
By Gordon S. Wood
The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
by Jill Lepore
Knopf, 337 pp., $30.00
One of the most important consequences of the upheaval in the writing of American history that has taken place over the past generation has been the new attention paid to the Indians. A century ago historians of early America scarcely acknowledged their existence. In the opening paragraphs of his essay in the first issue of the American Historical Review in 1895 Frederick Jackson Turner set forth his entire frontier thesis for understanding the origins of the United States, and the Indians had no place in it. For Turner, the New World that the Europeans came to in the seventeenth century was 'virgin soil,' an 'unexploited wilderness' out of which American distinctiveness was born. Indeed, wrote Turner, it was 'the fact of unoccupied territory in America that sets the evolution of American and European institutions in contrast.'[1]
Review, 4936 words
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