Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast (Native Americans of the Northeast)
Chet's enterprise is to explain the character and consequences of American war in its formative period, before the Revolution. He shows that it is not Americanized warfare, but the progressive Europeanization of war in America by professional British military and naval officers that ultimately overwhelms the poorer, less numerous, and less well-organized French-Indian axis of Canada and the West. Professionalism is the decisive factor, and it carries on into the Revolution and the early national period as an unsung but decisive influence on the creation of a new American empire.(Fred Anderson, author of Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754--1766)Chet's book presents a timely and convincing challenge to the deeply ingrained belief that colonial New England militiamen fought 'Indian style.' In reality, the Revolution's Minutemen embodied the culmination of a process by which the military tactics of the old world triumphed in the new.(Kevin Sweeney, Amherst College)