| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Uncas: First of the Mohegans. By Michael Leroy Oberg. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xii, 268 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-8014-3877-2.)

"Who then, and what was Uncas?" Michael Leroy Oberg proposes to answer this question in his study of the mercurial seventeenth-century Mohegan sachem. Oberg, the author of the earlier Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685 (1999), maintains in his new work that historians have not yet answered satisfactorily this question, posed a hundred years ago by Charles Frederick Chapin ("Uncas," Papers ... Society of Colonial Wars ... Connecticut, 1903). Despite the proliferation of scholarship over the past quarter century on seventeenth-century native southern New England, most scholars' views of Uncas, Oberg notes, fall into one of two camps: Uncas (c. 1600–1684) was either a great friend of the English and helped lay the foundation for civilizing and modernizing the Mohegans or a devious, treacherous, duplicitous quisling who placed his personal ambition above the interests of his community. Oberg finds these antipodal views limiting and offers a more nuanced reading of Uncas that shows that the headman "consistently pursued Mohegan interests" (p. 149).

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