Dissertation Information for James David Drake NAME: - James David Drake
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1996)
ADVISORS: - None COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Melissa L. Meyer - Timothy Earle
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Severing the ties that bind them: A reconceptualization of King Philip's War
Abstract: In 1675 various Indians of New England staged a massive uprising against the colonial governments in the region. This study explores the ways in which the conflict was analogous to a civil war. While much recent literature in colonial Native American history has highlighted the interaction, cultural overlap, and shared experiences of Indians and European colonists, this body of work has failed to address adequately the deterioration of relationships between these two groups.
Unlike previous histories of the war, this study eschews the style of many military narratives that provide a virtual laundry list of battles, marches, and tactics. Instead, it focuses on issues of community, identity, and morality. Using archaeological, linguistic, and documentary evidence, it shows that local English and Indian polities in New England, although they retained their distinct cultural identities after contact, intermeshed to form a kind of single society. Once the war within this society began, the opposing sides did not draw up neatly along ethnic lines, as various groups of Indians exerted a tremendous effort putting down the rebellion relative to their population.
Because the various participants in the war had led an interdependent existence for the preceding generation, their wartime conduct paralleled that to be expected of a seventeenth-century civil conflict. By comparing the wartime conduct of Puritans during King Philip's War to that of Englishmen in the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Thirty Years War, and the English Civil War, the study shows that New England Puritans behaved as if they saw Philip's War as a civil one. For the region's Indians, King Philip's War was often fought among kin, making it at times a quintessential civil conflict.
King Philip's War had many legacies. It severed the ties that had allowed Indians and English to live interdependently for over a generation. The final chapter of the dissertation shows that Indians and English had been so interdependent, that in severing their prewar ties, both groups had to make dramatic cultural adaptations. In killing one another, they had killed a part of themselves.
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calculated 2009-02-03 10:58:55
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