My AH Collection "American Indian Victories" is on Kindle Countdown at $1.99 until Saturday. Not sure of the exact timing on Saturday.
The direct link is:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Indian-Victories-Dale-Cozort-ebook/dp/B009XCGWVM/
Here is an extended excerpt from the forward:
American Indians are a tricky subject for alternate history. They were a dramatic and colorful lost cause, but there are two reasons Indians have historically not been as popular as the Confederate States of America or the World War II Axis as subjects of alternate history. First, they lost out against European encroachment for extremely hard-to-reverse reasons. The tides of history ran against Indians to a far greater extent than they did against even the Axis in World War II, or the South in the Civil War. Second, it is difficult to write realistic Indian alternate history that has much to do with Indian tribes most people have heard of, or with the picture most people have of Indians.
Why the Indians lost—Epidemics: Indian battlefield victories were generally meaningless in the face of a cruel bit of arithmetic. In most cases, contact with Europeans led to at least a hundred years of relentless Indian population declines from introduced diseases—declines that cut those populations to a tiny fraction (typically ten to twenty-five percent) of their precontact levels. Indians faced the equivalent of Europe's Black Death every fifteen to twenty years for more than a century.
Those epidemics didn't kill faceless, replaceable generic Indians. They killed experienced leaders, skilled craftsmen and men of genius—artists and innovators. European diseases disrupted Indian societies so severely that many alternate history buffs write them off for that reason alone.
Why the Indians lost—the technology gap: The technology gap wasn't across the board. Indians could show the Old World a thing or two in some areas of technology. However, the most technologically advanced and politically sophisticated Indian groups were materially and politically thousands of years behind the European cultures they faced. Aztecs and Incas technologically and materially resembled—at best—Assyrians of 1000 BC more than Europeans of 1500 AD. The Old World had a twenty-five hundred to five-thousand year lead over the New World in accumulating the tools of technologically advanced cultures.
Unfortunately for the Indians, the technology gap extended beyond the physical realm. Europeans had time to accumulate a much larger playbook of military and political strategies than the Indians, and that gap was just as important as the physical technology.
The technology gap had nothing to do with the intelligence of individual Indians or the worth of Indian cultures. It came about for at least three reasons. First, Indians started out behind Old World humans because they came to the New World with only a subset of Old World human culture. Pieces of technology and knowledge useful in cold climates made it. If something wasn't useful in Siberia and Alaska, it didn't make it to the New World, no matter how useful it was in temperate or tropical climates. Second, Indians never caught up, and often fell further behind because the continents they moved into were smaller than the Old World complex of Asia, Africa and Europe. The smaller continents meant fewer chances to find the right combination of factors for high technology to develop. Third, North and South America had far fewer animal resources to work with. By the time Indians were ready to domesticate animals, most of the best candidates—like North American horses and camels—were extinct.
Why the Indians lost—Indian wars: American Indians had major disadvantages against Europeans from the start, but they often fought hard and well. They almost always lost their wars against Europeans partly because they were more worried about fighting Indian enemies than about fighting Europeans. Try to think of a war between European settlers and Indians where no Indians fought on the side of the Europeans. I can't think of any. Indians fought each other for European powers even when no Europeans were present.
Indians came to the New World with a subset of the Old World human toolkit, a small subset of Old World human genetic diversity and an even smaller subset of the diseases that afflicted Old World humans. As a result, when regular contact between the Old and New Worlds began, Spaniards quickly seized the most heavily populated areas, like Mexico and Peru, and installed themselves at the top echelons of society. They had trouble maintaining that position because their subjects died off so quickly from European diseases.
Spain and other European colonizers imported African slaves to replace the missing workers. That made the problem worse for the Indians, because African diseases, like the deadlier types of malaria and yellow fever, joined European diseases in the New World. In extreme cases, Indians were nearly wiped out. In other areas, populations dropped to ten to twenty-five percent of precontact levels before partially recovering. In a very few areas, Indian populations grew through most or all of the period.
Diseases spread from the more populated areas to less populated ones, leaving those areas open to European colonization. Those colonies brought more diseases, leaving still more territory open to colonization.
Finally, most Indian tribes that nonhistorians have heard of developed or became prominent because of direct or indirect interactions with Europeans. Tribes like the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles did not exist as distinct ethnic and political units before European contact, and probably never would have existed given a different pattern of European settlement. The horse-riding plains nomads that most people think of when they think of American Indians were also products of interaction with Europeans. That makes it hard to write serious Alternate History involving Indians recognizable to most readers.
[FONT="]Given those problems, I can understand alternate history buffs writing off Indians as a subject for alternate history. I beg to differ with that opinion though, and will present a series of exercises in alternate history that illustrate why. [/FONT]
The direct link is:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Indian-Victories-Dale-Cozort-ebook/dp/B009XCGWVM/
Here is an extended excerpt from the forward:
American Indians are a tricky subject for alternate history. They were a dramatic and colorful lost cause, but there are two reasons Indians have historically not been as popular as the Confederate States of America or the World War II Axis as subjects of alternate history. First, they lost out against European encroachment for extremely hard-to-reverse reasons. The tides of history ran against Indians to a far greater extent than they did against even the Axis in World War II, or the South in the Civil War. Second, it is difficult to write realistic Indian alternate history that has much to do with Indian tribes most people have heard of, or with the picture most people have of Indians.
Why the Indians lost—Epidemics: Indian battlefield victories were generally meaningless in the face of a cruel bit of arithmetic. In most cases, contact with Europeans led to at least a hundred years of relentless Indian population declines from introduced diseases—declines that cut those populations to a tiny fraction (typically ten to twenty-five percent) of their precontact levels. Indians faced the equivalent of Europe's Black Death every fifteen to twenty years for more than a century.
Those epidemics didn't kill faceless, replaceable generic Indians. They killed experienced leaders, skilled craftsmen and men of genius—artists and innovators. European diseases disrupted Indian societies so severely that many alternate history buffs write them off for that reason alone.
Why the Indians lost—the technology gap: The technology gap wasn't across the board. Indians could show the Old World a thing or two in some areas of technology. However, the most technologically advanced and politically sophisticated Indian groups were materially and politically thousands of years behind the European cultures they faced. Aztecs and Incas technologically and materially resembled—at best—Assyrians of 1000 BC more than Europeans of 1500 AD. The Old World had a twenty-five hundred to five-thousand year lead over the New World in accumulating the tools of technologically advanced cultures.
Unfortunately for the Indians, the technology gap extended beyond the physical realm. Europeans had time to accumulate a much larger playbook of military and political strategies than the Indians, and that gap was just as important as the physical technology.
The technology gap had nothing to do with the intelligence of individual Indians or the worth of Indian cultures. It came about for at least three reasons. First, Indians started out behind Old World humans because they came to the New World with only a subset of Old World human culture. Pieces of technology and knowledge useful in cold climates made it. If something wasn't useful in Siberia and Alaska, it didn't make it to the New World, no matter how useful it was in temperate or tropical climates. Second, Indians never caught up, and often fell further behind because the continents they moved into were smaller than the Old World complex of Asia, Africa and Europe. The smaller continents meant fewer chances to find the right combination of factors for high technology to develop. Third, North and South America had far fewer animal resources to work with. By the time Indians were ready to domesticate animals, most of the best candidates—like North American horses and camels—were extinct.
Why the Indians lost—Indian wars: American Indians had major disadvantages against Europeans from the start, but they often fought hard and well. They almost always lost their wars against Europeans partly because they were more worried about fighting Indian enemies than about fighting Europeans. Try to think of a war between European settlers and Indians where no Indians fought on the side of the Europeans. I can't think of any. Indians fought each other for European powers even when no Europeans were present.
Indians came to the New World with a subset of the Old World human toolkit, a small subset of Old World human genetic diversity and an even smaller subset of the diseases that afflicted Old World humans. As a result, when regular contact between the Old and New Worlds began, Spaniards quickly seized the most heavily populated areas, like Mexico and Peru, and installed themselves at the top echelons of society. They had trouble maintaining that position because their subjects died off so quickly from European diseases.
Spain and other European colonizers imported African slaves to replace the missing workers. That made the problem worse for the Indians, because African diseases, like the deadlier types of malaria and yellow fever, joined European diseases in the New World. In extreme cases, Indians were nearly wiped out. In other areas, populations dropped to ten to twenty-five percent of precontact levels before partially recovering. In a very few areas, Indian populations grew through most or all of the period.
Diseases spread from the more populated areas to less populated ones, leaving those areas open to European colonization. Those colonies brought more diseases, leaving still more territory open to colonization.
Finally, most Indian tribes that nonhistorians have heard of developed or became prominent because of direct or indirect interactions with Europeans. Tribes like the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles did not exist as distinct ethnic and political units before European contact, and probably never would have existed given a different pattern of European settlement. The horse-riding plains nomads that most people think of when they think of American Indians were also products of interaction with Europeans. That makes it hard to write serious Alternate History involving Indians recognizable to most readers.
[FONT="]Given those problems, I can understand alternate history buffs writing off Indians as a subject for alternate history. I beg to differ with that opinion though, and will present a series of exercises in alternate history that illustrate why. [/FONT]