He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Cutting-Off Way sits at the very beginning of Chapter five, which is a detailed recounting of how first the Tuscaroras and then the Cherokees confronted the problem of home defense against European attacks in the 18th century. Those two Nations chose different combinations of using fortifications and attacking European logistics as they learned about European capabilities and weaknesses over time. This page explains why these particular case studies are effective and revealing, noting that among other things, that analyzing the "most fundamental of military problems—home defense" helps "narrow the evidentiary complexity of decoding the Indians' motives and ideologies of war." This page also emphasizes change and adaptation within Native American methods of warfare. There were key continuities—indeed the book title itself refers to the operational method that retained its value for the entire period—but there were crucial shifts over time as Native American Nations reassessed changes in the threats they faced.Learn more about The Cutting-Off Way at The University of North Carolina Press website.
Page 99 represents a reasonably good introduction to the problems the book is trying to solve! How did Native Americans fight? How did they adapt their mode of fighting to European technologies and capabilities? And even more crucially, how did those adaptations themselves change over time. There was no one change from method A to method B. There was constant adaptation.
The Page 99 Test: Barbarians and Brothers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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