This book offers the first full-scale analysis of the Pequot War (1636-37), a pivotal event in New England colonial history. Through an innovative rereading of the Puritan sources, Alfred A. Cave refutes claims that settlers acted defensively to counter a Pequot conspiracy to exterminate Europeans. Drawing on archaeological, linguistic, and anthropological evidences to trace the evolution of the conflict, he sheds new light on the motivations of the Pequots and their Indian allies, the fur trade, and the cultural values and attitudes in New England. He also provides a reappraisal of the interaction of ideology and self- interest as motivating factors in the Puritan attack on the Pequots.

This book offers an overview of the Pequot, including their history, the Pequot War, homes, food, clothing, religion, and government.

Before their massacre by Massachusetts Puritans in 1637, the Pequots were preeminent in southern New England. Their location on the eastern Connecticut shore made them important producers of the wampum required to trade for furs from the Iroquois. They were also the only Connecticut Indians to oppose the land-hungry English. For those reasons, they became the first victims of white genocide in colonial America. Despite the Pequot War of 1637, and the greed and neglect of their white neighbors and "overseers," the Pequots endured in their ancestral homeland. In 1983 they achieved federal recognition. In 1987 they commemorated the 350th anniversary of the Pequot War by organizing the Mashantucket Pequot Historical Conference, at which distinguished scholars presented the articles assembled here.

Brown uses 20 objects to summon up major developments in America's history. The objects range in date from a Pequot stone axe head probably made before the Pequot War in 1637, to the western novel Dwight Eisenhower was reading while waiting for the Normandy Invasion to begin.