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The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America's First People, Tuininga, Matthew J, New York, Oxford University Press, 2024 (ISBN 9780197671764), 464 pp., HB $33.85

Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: In The Wars of the Lord, Matthew J. Tuininga offers a historical narrative that avoids the platitudes that too often haunt this kind of research.Spanning the years between the Mayflower's arrival in 1620 and the devastating King Philip's War (1675-1676), Tuininga illuminates the messy intersection of faith, ideology, and violence in early New England, compelling readers to wrestle with complexity rather than comfort.We live in an era of 'decolonizing', where scholarship often suffers under the impulse to assign guilt based solely on geography.This tendency is, ironically, the inverse of an earlier academic habit of uncritically giving the benefit of the doubt based on geography.Tuininga achieves his goal with clarity and empathy.The book reads like a drama and engages its audience with cinematic force.He demonstrates his skill as both a writer and a historian.Rather than providing a clear-cut villain or hero, Tuininga paints a nuanced portrait: the Puritans saw themselves as a covenant community-'Israel' to the Native 'Canaanites'-consumed by genuine spiritual zeal yet tragically blind to the moral consequences of conquest.Native peoples, in turn, understood themselves as continuing a tradition rooted in the land and in their ancestors given to them by spirits.His storytelling is vivid and immersive.Scenes of miscommunication, broken promises and escalating brutality feel cinematic in their intensity.Tuininga is careful to honour Native American agency by developing a more textured view of how they perceived the English and how those perceptions shaped their responses.Previous and contemporary analyses that render both sides as one-dimensional can only be corrected through this kind of careful scholarship.Importantly, Tuininga resists moralizing.He notes that earlier generations of historians tended to idealize the colonists, while later narratives vilified them.In contrast, the reality is more complicated and unsettling.He emphasizes understanding motivations over simplistic judgement, quoting poignantly: 'Ultimately … it is less important to judge the dead than
DOI: 10.1111/rirt.70004
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7091706529
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