Summary Of War On Native America By Alice Mann

Barbara Alice Mann, a professor at Toledo University and author of George Washington’s War on Native America, is known for her books on Native American history. However, all of her books should be read with caution, because she only uses one perspective in her books. On allamericanspeakers.com, all of her books listed were about Native Americans, yet all of her books contained the viewpoint of a Native American. Therefore, her books would suggest a biased view towards historical investigations. In George Washington’s War on Native America, Mann listed a few topics she declared no other historians discussed. She claimed George Washington fought Native Americans and not the British in the ‘Old Northwest,’ ordered attacks against Natives, used

One misconception she described was the belief European and Native American Warfare were similar. She stated Native American combat was comparable to martial arts, and not fought to the death like Europian warfare. Killing on the battlefield was a waste of life in the eyes of Native Americans. Instead, they would take captives to adopt them into their society. Based on this evidence, it would seem that the Native population was inherently peaceful. However, the way Mann described the colonist’s perspective of the Native Americans were different than what she depicted the way Natives behaved. Colonists would dress up as Native Americans to commit crimes, one example of this was the Boston Tea Party. This further fed the notion Natives were “bloodthirsty savages tomahawking innocent settlers” (p. 15). Mann claimed historians only use the colonist’s perspectives of Native Americans, “leaving modern students unaware of the major settler attacks on civilian populations” of Native Americans (p. 15). Mann believed all of this misconception of history was based on historians unwillingness to cover the material. However, while historians have a bias, it is common practice to exhaust every plausible source to understand better history. Historians become ostracized and lose credibility if they willingly leave out information that would drastically change the narrative of history. Therefore, Mann’s claim that

However, they were at war, and she did try to take their perspective on the manner.Based on Mann;s description of Brodhead’s destruction of Native crops and villages, she targeted the emotions of the reader by capitalizing on sympathy for the Native Americans. However, the question was not raised whether the actions of Brodhead was justifiable. Mann conveniently left out the strategy behind Washington’s campaign. Native Americans were allies of the British. If the crops were burnt, they could not be used to supply the British soldiers. Additionally, British resources would need to be allocated to support the Native Americans, instead of aiding the war effort by distributing the supplies throughout the military ranks. Later in the book Mann said how detrimental destroying homes and crops were for the war effort (p.