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Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, by Michael A. Bellesiles
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How and when did Americans develop their obsession with guns? Is gun-related violence so deeply embedded in American historical experience as to be immutable? The accepted answers to these questions are "mythology," says Michael A. Bellesiles.
Basing his arguments on sound and prodigious research, Bellesiles makes it clear that gun ownership was the exception--even on the frontier--until the age of industrialization. In Colonial America the average citizen had virtually no access to or training in the use of firearms, and the few guns that did exist were kept under strict control. No guns were made in America until after the Revolution, and there were few gunsmiths to keep them in repair.
Bellesiles shows that the U.S. government, almost from its inception, worked to arm its citizens, but it met only public indifference and resistance until the 1850s, when technological advances--such as repeating revolvers with self-contained bullets--contributed to a surge in gun manufacturing. Finally, we see how the soaring gun production engendered by the Civil War, and the decision to allow soldiers to keep their weapons at the end of the conflict, transformed the gun from a seldom-needed tool to a perceived necessity--opposing ideas that are still at the center of the fight for and against gun control today.
Michael A. Bellesiles's research set off a chain of passionate reaction after its publication in the Journal of American History in 1996, and Arming America is certain to be one of the most controversial and widely read books on the subject.
- Sales Rank: #1996515 in Books
- Published on: 2000-09-05
- Released on: 2000-09-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.37" h x 6.37" w x 9.56" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 624 pages
Amazon.com Review
While gun supporters use the nation's gun-toting history in defense of their way of life, and revolutionary enthusiasts replay skirmishes on historic battlefields, it now turns out that America has not always had a gun culture, and wide-scale gun ownership is much newer than we think. After a 10-year search for "a world that isn't there," professor and scholar Michael Bellesiles discovered that Americans not only rarely owned guns prior to the Civil War, they wouldn't even take them for free from a government that wanted to arm its reluctant public. No sharpshooters, no gun in every home, no children learning to hunt beside their fathers. Bellesiles--whose research methods have generated a great deal of controversy and even a subsequent investigation by Emory University--searched legal, probate, military, and business records; fiction and personal letters; hunting magazines; and legislation in his quest for the legendary gun-wielding frontiersman, only to discover that he is a myth. There are other revelations: gun ownership and storage was strictly legislated in colonial days, and frivolous shooting of a musket was backed by the death penalty; men rarely died in duels because the guns were far too inaccurate (duels were about honor, not murder); pioneers didn't hunt (they trapped and farmed); frontier folk loved books, not guns; and the militia never won a war (it was too inept). In fact, prior to the Civil War, when mass production of higher quality guns became a reality, the republic's greatest problem was a dearth of guns, and a public that was too peaceable to care about civil defense. As Bellesiles writes, "Probably the major reason why the American Revolution lasted eight years, longer than any war in American history before Vietnam, was that when that brave patriot reached above the mantel, he pulled down a rusty, decaying, unusable musket (not a rifle), or found no gun there at all." Strangely, the eagle-eye frontiersman was created by East Coast fiction writers, while the idea of a gun as a household necessity was an advertising ploy of gun maker Samuel Colt (both just prior to the Civil War). The former group fabricated a historic and heroic past while Colt preyed on overblown fears of Indians and blacks.
Bellesiles, who is highly knowledgeable about weapons and military history, never comes out against guns. He is more interested in discovering the truth than in taking sides. Nevertheless, his work shatters some time-honored myths and icons--including the usual reading of the Second Amendment--and will be hard to refute. This fascinating, eye-opening account is sure to both inform and inflame the already highly charged debate about guns in America. --Lesly Reed
From Publishers Weekly
Like most students of U.S. history, Bellesiles (Emory University) believed gun-related violence was inextricably woven into the American past from its earliest days. Then he started studying county probate records as part of a project about the early American frontier. To his surprise, he found that for the years 1765 to 1770, only 14 percent of probate inventories listed a gun. Further study convinced Bellesiles that American gun culture began only with the Civil War. Sickened by the carnage associated with guns today, Bellesiles, in his second book (following Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier), is agenda driven. If U.S. society has, as he contends, been largely free of gun-related violence in the past, then it could be again. This agenda, however, does not taint Bellesiles's scholarship. Through examination of "[l]egal, probate, military and business records, travel accounts, personal letters" and other primary sources, he painstakingly documents the relative absence of guns before the Civil WarAand the rise of the gun culture in its wake, due to an increasingly urban populace now accustomed to shooting and newly industrialized gun manufacturers tooled up to mass-produce firearms. This combination of factors, he argues, led to the violence-prone American ethos, one that fetishizes guns. Bellesiles's approachable writing style makes easily digestible this revision of the historiographical record. "The question is one of cultural primacy," Bellesiles contends. "What lies at the core of national identity?" His answer is bound to inflame today's impassioned controversy over gun control.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Expect vitriolic debate about historian Bellesiles' analysis of when and how the U.S. came to have a "national gun culture," because it upends the traditional notion that guns are as American as apple pie. Bellesiles argues that "gun ownership was exceptional in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, even on the frontier." Guns became commonplace only toward midcentury, as American-made weapons began to equal European guns in quality, and the Civil War taught large numbers of men how to use them. Americans indeed developed "a fixation with firearms that any modern enthusiast would recognize and salute," but this fixation developed only in the 1870s. From the Revolution through the 1840s, government tried to arm its citizens, with limited success; it subsidized the gun industry, which ultimately mechanized production enough to produce large quantities of quality weapons. And then, Bellesiles observes, "The Civil War transformed the gun from a tool into a perceived necessity. The War preserved the Union, unifying the nation around a single icon: the gun." Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
186 of 210 people found the following review helpful.
Problems with this book!
By David L. Peterson
Before you buy this book, please take note of the problems which have come from it.
1. The Bancroft Prize which this book won in 2001 was withdrawn in 2002 due to the fact that Bellesiles "had violated basic norms of acceptable scholarly conduct" during the time when he researched and wrote the book.
2. Bellesiles was employed as a professor of history at Emory University until he was forced to resign due to "unprofessional and misleading work" that he put into this book.
3.Bellesiles said in an interview with a National Review reporter that he used "San Fransisco records from 1849-50 and 1858-59", but when the reporter confronted him with the fact that those documents were destroyed during the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, he claimed that his memory was bad and told the reporter to check some libraries, when she did, they did not have the documents either.
In conclusion, this book is a fabrication, and anyone who has studied the history of the United States military from The Revolution to The War of 1812 to The Civil War knows that the majority of units were militia, made up of citizen soldiers who armed themselfs, due to the culture that didn't love guns, but saw them as useful tools, and quite often at that. But Mr. Bellesiles does not want you to know that, so that he may infleuence political opinions.
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Of interest to collectors and historians
By Greg Broiles
.. this book is destined for a special place in the libraries of historians as an example of the dangers of thesis-driven research. A winner of the prestigious Bancroft prize, this book ultimately led to the resignation under fire of the author, formerly a tenured professor at Emory University. An independent review commission from Emory reviewed the numerous charges of falsification and sloppy research levelled against Bellesiles after his book won popular acclaim among gun prohibitionists. The book was well-received becuase it questioned the historical basis for the Second Amendment even as scholarly consensus has grown amongst law professors and commentators that the Second Amendment does, in fact, protect an individual right to keep and bear arms. Unfortunately for Bellesiles, the Emory review committee's investigator and other independent researchers were unable to substantiate his claims and conclusions given the evidence Bellesiles claims to have reviewed (which, in several cases, had been destroyed decades before Bellesiles was born). Bellesiles apologized, in his response to the report of the committee which held that he was guilty of falsification of data and "serious deviation from accepted practices in carrying out and reporting results from research", and said that he intended to correct his mistakes in a second edition of this book, or in journal articles to be published later. It appears that Bellesiles may not enjoy the opportunity to correct his mistakes, as his credibility has been seriously damaged amongst historians.
As the Emory committee wrote, ".. the best that can be said of his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work. Every aspect of his work in the probate records is deeply flawed . . . . Bellesiles seems to have been utterly unaware of the importance of the possibility of the replication of his research. Subsequent to the allegations of research misconduct, his responses have been prolix, confusing, evasive, and occasionally contradictory . . . . [e]ven at this point, it is not clear that he fully understands the magnitude of his own probate research shortcomings."
4 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Why the controversy?
By A Customer
Michael Bellelisles's book definitely challenges the common assumptions about the United States's gun culture, which explains the strong reactions this book receives. Guns were Far from being a universal item in this country's culture as is usually presented. In fact, the American frontier is a rather placid place populated by farmers who were more interested in farming than shooting game...
It took a lot of time to properly care for firearms (which were made of iron which rusts if not taken care of properly) that can be more profitably spent working the farm. Another reviewer has outlined the technology (or lack thereof) which precludes the widespread ownership of firearms prior to the mid 19th Century.
Additionally, the militia was the important focus of the Second Amendment. This was a body that was not very popular with the "people" who have the right to bear arms...The United States militia system provided citizen soldiers who were inept and poorly armed allowing for Washington, DC to be burned by British Regulars...
Mr. Bellelisles does have extensive footnotes and a bibliography which can be seen at his website...
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