Like many other tales of murder, the death of John Oldman seems simple; Oldham ended up in a watery grave and justice was quickly dispensed to those who killed him, launching the Pequot War. However, the tale of his death, which is much more complex, begins with a century long conflict that had been going on between Indians and Europeans (pg. 273). Lipman emphasizes that in order to properly understand both Oldman’s murder and the conflict between the two groups, one must look to the sea.<\/p>\n

Although there were other reasons for the conflict, the Europeans for centuries had considered themselves the \u201clords\u201d of the sea, while the Indians had just been ignorant bystanders (pg. 274). In fact, not were the Indians cartographic and geographic knowledge of the region more sophisticated than that of the Europeans, many times their vessels also were, so much so that the European often copied and stole Indian canoes (pg. 280). This led to resentment from many Indian groups towards the Europeans. This resentment was exacerbated by European reliance on Indian navigation and knowledge of coastal areas. On several different occasions, Europeans took Pequots hostage to use them as guides (pg. 283). European’s view of their own supremacy combined with resentment and distrust from the Pequot changed diplomacy between the groups and made them resentful of each other.<\/p>\n

My colleague Tram Hua<\/a> suggests that the rivalry between Indians and Europeans was one of the main points that the author made, which I agree with. While the author mentions the actual death and killing of Oldman, the bulk of his argument is about the conflicts and the lack of diplomacy leading up to the war. Furthermore, he highlights the importance of the sea and the conflicts it created between the two groups.<\/p>\n

…read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many other tales of murder, the death of John Oldman seems simple; Oldham ended up in a watery grave and justice was quickly dispensed to those who killed him, launching the Pequot War. However, the tale of his death, which is much more complex, begins with a century long conflict that had been going […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":996412,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737\/revisions\/996412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}