Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 179.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on April 7, 2025, in Austin, Texas.

We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism.

As always, the best way to listen to the history of the America's podcast is from the beginning, because it all ties together.

But the second best way to listen to

at least this episode is after you've recently listened to the first two in our series on

King Phillips War. It's the summer of 1675, and war has broken out in the shared territory of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag Confederation.

It is, in at least that sense, a civil war, insofar as people who have lived in close proximity with borders defined by land deeds and under overlapping jurisdictions defined by treaty and practice,

over 50 years, now are at war with each other.

It's also a religious war, not so much in the cause of religion per se,

but in part is a consequence of the spreading of Christianity

among the Indians, which threatened those who practiced traditional religions, lived in traditional

ways, and followed their traditional leaders. Eventually, it would look more and more like a racial

and cultural war. Civil wars, religious

wars, and race wars have a tendency to become particularly brutal. And by fits and starts,

that would happen to King Phillips' War. The question at the beginning of the fighting on June 23, 1675, was whether it would be a

short dust-up within Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag lands encompassed by the colony's borders,

as defined by the New Englanders, or would it spread more widely? That question was very quickly answered.

The wildfire of King Philip's war would spread to encompass virtually all of New England

east of the Connecticut River and up the coast of Maine.

The reasons why the local affair became a regional total war have been and always will be,

argued over by historians.

...