The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

In 1675 Algonquian Indians all over southern New England rose up against the Puritan colonists with whom they had lived peacefully for several decades. The result was a terrifying conflict in which the Puritans found themselves fighting with a cruelty they had thought only the natives capable of. By August 1676, when the severed head of the Wampanoag leader, King Philip, was displayed in Boston, thousands of Indian and English men, women, and children were dead, and the settlers' sense of themselves as civilized people of God had been deeply shaken.