Jill Lepore’s account of King Philip’s War convincingly reconstructs a world where identities were fluid, but a middle ground could be dangerous.  According to Lepore, the Puritans were constantly engaged in a struggle to separate themselves from the “barbaric” Indians.  In doing so, they latched on to their property—houses and gardens that “Anglicized” an otherwise savage landscape and clothes that signified English dignity.  In fact, Lepore argues that it was the loss of property, along with its accompanying symbolism, that the colonists most feared.   In this sense, Englishness was not stable; it was tied to property and symbols, the loss of which had to be carefully guarded against.

Lepore thus demonstrates what was at stake for the English colonists in the war: but the Indians’ motivations and sense of identity is less clear.  For example, Lepore suggests that torture was an important part of Indian rituals—one deeply connected to their own sense of identity—and argues that the colonists consistently misread this symbolism.  Similarly, Lepore shows how colonists took part in a greater debate over just war theory, but only hints that Indians had similar rules of war.  Indians too drew boundaries about what was acceptable and what was unacceptable, although it is unclear where those lines fell.  This asymmetry of information might weaken parts of Lepore’s book, but it strengthens her overall argument: we can catch only glimpses of how the Indians may have interpreted the war because, ultimately, the colonists controlled the presses. 

However, I ended up wondering if, in her eagerness to see the colonists’ pens forging a new American identity, Lepore ended up homogenizing a large proportion of the population.  Especially in her later section, Lepore seems to jumps from a small group of English colonists to a much wider American population.  Lepore mentions that King Philip’s War had metaphorical utility during the American Revolution, but she glosses over how the American population had changed by that point.  Did the population of all thirteen colonies subscribe to the same kind of American identity that the Puritans had introduced?