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Matthew J. Tuininga is Professor of Christian Ethics and the History of Christianity at Calvin Theological Seminary in Michigan. He is author or editor of several books, including most recently The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People, which has been an important source for this podcast’s series on King Philip’s War.
This episode is useful context not only for our series on King Philip’s War, which is still very much in progress, but also many of the other stories we’ve told about early New England. We talk about the intersection of religion and war in 17th century Massachusetts, the sheer difficulty of colonialism, the evolution of Puritan evangelism in the decades between the landing of Mayflower and King Philip’s War, the slow development of racialist thinking, the rise of racial hostility against Indians first among the settlers on the frontier to the distress of the Puritan elites in Boston, the influence, or not, of the younger generation of settlers and Indians on the coming of the war, whether Uncas of the Mohegans was a great and shrewed leader or merely treacherous, whether King Philip’s War was inevitable, the “war guilt,” or not, of Samuel Mosely and Edward Hutchinson, the wisdom of John Winthrop, Jr., whether King Philip’s War was “worth it” from the perspective of the settlers, the influence of the fog of war on Puritan decisions, KPW as counterinsurgency, historical myths of recent vintage that inflate Christian Indian deaths, the validity of Native American oral tradition as an historical source, and the importance of narrative history in getting people excited about history.
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