TBD - draft review:

Compare to modern historians, in the 1970s, Axtell, Neal Salisbury, Francis Jennings, dissatisfied with the view of either primitive cultures or "balanced with Nature".

“Indians were seen as trivial, ineffectual patsies,” Salisbury, a historian at Smith College, says of the history actual taught to susceptible children in the United States.

But does a whole continent of patsies make sense, really?

By the 1990s, we have witnessed a tsunami of inquiry into the interactions between natives and newcomers in the era when they faced each other as relative equals. “No other field in American history has grown as fast,” according to Joyce Chaplin, a Harvard historian, in 2003. This 1994 volume is part of that tsunami.

It is true that Indian societies collapsed in the "Colonial Period". This had everything to do with the natives themselves, and with geography, and pathology. It was certainly to religiously ordained or technologically determined.

I like how Salisbury put it: “When you look at the historical record, it’s clear that Indians were trying to control their own destinies.” Even though neither the Indians nor the Colonials and Kings predicted the consequences.