About
About the Author
Kevin March is a PhD student in Colonial & Native American History at Boston College. His digital humanities project on the Wabanaki Confederacy’s experience in King Philip’s War (1675-1678). This website grew out of his current research project on the same topic. Before starting at Boston College, Kevin earned an M.A. in History from McGill University in December 2019 and also has a B.A. in History from Cornell University, graduating magna cum laude in May 2016.
Kevin also has experience as an educator, college admissions counselor, and standardized test tutor. He also worked public history roles as an undergraduate intern at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, a graduate intern and the Castine Historical Society, and a contributor to the history podcast Reel Fiction. In his spare time, Kevin enjoys watching baseball, painting, and iced coffee.
About the Project
Kevin’s digital humanities project explores the experience of the Wabanaki Confederacy in King Philip’s War. Its purpose is to reassess the course and outcome of the war, which historians have usually depicted as a decisive defeat for all indigenous peoples in New England. As Kevin shows through his Timeline and Records pages, this interpretation is not supported by the available historical evidence. To the contrary, the Wabanakis used their increasing political unity to achieve military victory over the English. They accomplished this by elaborating on existing kinship-based social structures to form a loose political, military, and economic alliance called the Wabanaki Confederacy. By forging key alliances with the Canadian Indians and French, attacking English settlements and vessels, and extracting resources from its would-be colonizers, the Wabanaki Confederacy maintained and even expanded its sovereignty. While many Indian tribes were forced into a defensive, reactive position in the aftermath of King Philip’s War, the Wabanakis used their military victory to construct a fluid but robust indigenous polity that shaped colonial and imperial politics in the Northeast.
Kevin’s project has two major purposes:
1. to provide an engaging historical resource for undergraduate students.
2. to showcase his most recent project for professional historians.
Kevin hopes that undergraduates will engage with his timeline and consult the Perspectives page for examples of historical analysis. Students looking for a short summary of the war should read the Overview of King Philip’s War page, and those who want to learn more about the conflict independently should check out the Further Reading section. Specialists should consult the Home page and Bibliography to get a sense of Kevin’s research interests, which will explore how the Wabanaki peoples exercised political power and territorial sovereignty in the Northeast from 1675 to 1727.
Acknowledgements
Collaboration is a fundamental part of almost all academic work, and digital humanities projects are no exception. Therefore, Kevin wishes to thank several individuals who made this project (and his previous digital humanities work) possible. Dr. Bee Lehman and Dr. Matthew Naglak provided invaluable conceptual and technical assistance on this project. Professor Owen Stanwood helped with the early planning stages of this project and has skillfully guided Kevin's academic development. Finally, Kevin would like to thank his friends and colleagues in the Digital Humanities Certificate program at Boston College. Without their thoughtful feedback and unwavering moral support, this project would never have been finished.