The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture
- ISBN-10
- 0465098568
- ISBN-13
- 9780465098569
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 528
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-04-19
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- Author
- Pamela Haag
Description
Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation. Or so we’re told. In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional, but precisely because it was not: guns proliferated in America because throughout most of the nation’s history, they were perceived as an unexceptional commodity, no different than buttons or typewriters. Focusing on the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, one of the most iconic arms manufacturers in America, Haag challenges many basic assumptions of how and when America became a gun culture. Under the leadership of Oliver Winchester and his heirs, the company used aggressive, sometimes ingenious sales and marketing techniques to create new markets for their product. Guns have never “sold themselves”; rather, through advertising and innovative distribution campaigns, the gun industry did. Through the meticulous examination of gun industry archives, Haag challenges the myth of a primal bond between Americans and their firearms. Over the course of its 150 year history, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company sold over 8 million guns. But Oliver Winchester—a shirtmaker in his previous career—had no apparent qualms about a life spent arming America. His daughter-in-law Sarah Winchester was a different story. Legend holds that Sarah was haunted by what she considered a vast blood fortune, and became convinced that the ghosts of rifle victims were haunting her. She channeled much of her inheritance, and her conflicted conscience, into a monstrous estate now known as the Winchester Mystery House, where she sought refuge from this ever-expanding army of phantoms. In this provocative and deeply-researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America, and in so doing explodes the clichés that have created and sustained our lethal gun culture.
Get the book
Similar books
-
The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture
By Pamela HaagPamela Haag shows conclusively that this country's tragic obsession with guns is not part of our political origins, or our constitutional and moral DNA; it is the result of marketing and industrial capitalism. Our gun culture was made, ...
-
America, My New Home
By Monica GunningIn twenty-three compelling poems, Jamaican-born poet Monica Gunning tells her immigrant's story with gentle humor, grace, and a child's sense of wonder.
-
Shut Up, America!: The End of Free Speech
By Brad O'Leary7 An assessment of the problem was put very succinctly by Kevin Peters, a local news correspondent with KHOU-TV: “Studies show that Democrat Barack Obama gets more favorable coverage than Republican John McCain.
-
Living with Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment
By Craig WhitneyAnd do 30,000 of us really have to die by gunfire every year as the price of a freedom protected by the Constitution? In Living with Guns, Craig R. Whitney, former foreign correspondent and editor at the New York Times, seeks out answers.
-
Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America
By Adam WinklerJohn M. Bruce and Clyde Wilcox (1998), 45, 52. Orth's testimony in Congress is recounted in Osha Gray Davidson, Under Fire: The NRA and the Battle for Gun Control (1998), 30. On Orth's moderate support of the final Gun Control Act, ...
-
Baltimore's Halcyon Days
By Brooke Gunning, Molly O'DonovanBaltimore's Halcyon Days chronicles Baltimore's social elite, their homes, and their lifestyle from the dawn of the Republic to the demise of the fingerbowl.
-
Marriage Confidential: Love in the Post-Romantic Age
By Pamela Haag" Pamela Haag has written the generational "big book" on modern marriage, a mesmerizing, sometimes salacious look at the semi-happy ambivalence lurking just below the surface of many marriages today.
-
Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense
By Caroline LightA history of America’s Stand Your Ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin After a young, white gunman killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, conservative ...
-
D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph
By Tom GunningIn shot twenty - one James Kirkwood sows the grain as he did in the film's second shot ( fig . 42 ) . Although the action and location are the same as the earlier shot , a number of important contrasts are set up .
-
The Widow's War: A Novel
By Sally GunningWhen Lyddie Berry's husband is lost in a whaling disaster, she becomes the dependent of her ruthless son-in-law, who tries to take everything she and her husband had worked for.