Exploring America's gun culture

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 242-268

  Bellesiles, Michael A ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70449835438     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491656     Document Type: Review

References (85)

1. Joyce L. Malcolm, review of Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000), in Texas Law Review, 79 (May 2001), 1659
2. Bellesiles, Arming America, 14
3. I do apologize for having somehow missed, as she notes, Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton, 1982)
4. Please see Bellesiles, Arming America, 581
5. Main, "Probate Records as a Source for Early American History," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 32 (1975), 89-99
6. Main, "The Distribution of Consumer Goods in Colonial New England: A Subregional Approach," in Peter Benes and Jane Benes, eds., Early American Probate Inventories (Boston, 1989), 163n
7. Gump, "Possessions and Patterns of Living in Washington County: The 20 Years Before Tennessee Statehood, 1777-1796" (M. A. thesis, East Tennessee State University, 1989), 12
8. Main, "Probate Records as a Source for Early American History," 98-99
9. Main, "Probate Records as a Source for Early American History," 95
10. Benes and Benes, eds., Early American Probate Inventories, 6
11. Sweeney, "Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethers field, Connecticut, 1639-1800," Connecticut Antiquarian, 36 (1984), 10-39
12. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970)
13. Smith, "Underregistration and Bias in Probate Records: An Analysis of Data from Eighteenth-Century Hingham, Massachusetts," WMQ, 3d Ser., 32 (1975), 104
14. Waters, "Patrimony, Succession, and Social Stability: Guilford, Connecticut, in the Eighteenth Century," Perspectives in American History, 10 (1976), 138
15. Jones, "Wealth Estimates for the New England Colonies about 1770." Journal of Economic History, 32 (1972), 115
16. Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, 1985), 48, 60-61
17. Sweeney, "Using Tax Lists to Detect Biases in Probate Inventories," in Benes and Benes, eds., Early American Probate Inventories, 35-36
18. Smith, "Underregistration and Bias in Probate Records," 105
19. See, for instance, the Emory Report, 52:32 (May 8, 2000)
20. Bellesiles, "Disarming the Critics," OAH Newsletter, 29 (Nov. 2001)
21. . My web project aims not simply to replicate my probate findings but to expand the evidentiary base. I am now researching and posting on the web 10-30-year periods from specific counties, reproducing every firearm and book listed in every probate file in those years. I have included books not only because I am interested in the subject of literacy and reading habits in early America but also because these lists give a powerful sense of how different probate collections work. The name of each decedent is included. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that I am not trying to prove any argument with this site. This disinterest is not disingenuous, for unlike Main, I do not believe that the probate records are central to the argument in Arming America. Yet I retain a keen interest in these materials for the very reasons Main suggests: they "furnish the social and economic historian with raw materials rarely available in other sources. The contents of the inventories often furnish the only guide to the deceased's means of earning his living, his family status, and the style in which he lived. . . . Household items reflect not only the standard of living of their owner but also the cultural assumptions that guided their purchase"; Main, "Probate Records as a Source for Early American History," 92
22. Main., "Probate Records as a Source for Early American History," 93
23. Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore, 1973), 146, 156, 233
24. See also Hoffman, "The 'Disaffected' in the Revolutionary South," in Alfred F. Young, The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, Ill., 1976), 273-316
25. Lawrence Delbert Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 123-26
26. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dusen (Oxford, 1993), 391
27. Wood, "America in the 1790s," Atlantic Monthly, 272 (Dec. 1993), 134
28. See Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, 1993), 75-77
29. Thomas Longmore, Gunshot Injuries, Their History, Characteristic Features, Complications, and General Treatment, 2d ed. (London, 1895). Here again there is an important dissertation waiting to be written about how technological improvements in firearms created first a crisis for medical science, and then helped to create new skills
30. Robert R. Dykstra, "To Live and Die in Dodge City: Body Counts, Law and Order, and the Case of Kansas v. Gill," in Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York, 1998), 211-12
31. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Nov. 12, 2001
32. Shurtleff and Pulsifer, eds., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, 1:96-97. Four white men were convicted and hanged for killing Penowanyanquis
33. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998), 21-47
34. See the excellent dissertation by Nicolas Wolfe Proctor, "Bathed in Blood: Hunting in the Antebellum South" (Emory University, 1998)
35. Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany, 1969)
36. Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill, 1994)
37. Giles Cromwell, The Virginia Manufactory of Arms (Charlottesville, 1975), 2-28
38. New York Packet, Apr. 25, 1782, Apr. 20, 1787
39. New York Daily Advertiser, Apr. 24, 1788, May 12, 1796
40. Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds., American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850 (Baltimore, 1995), 37-38
41. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York, 1986), 66-67
42. Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York, 2000)
43. Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (New York, 1982)
44. See, for instance, Basil P. Hughes, Firepower: Weapons Effectiveness on the Battlefield, 1630-1850 (New York, 1974)
45. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976)
46. J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715-1795 (Oxford, 1981)
47. Paddy Griffith, Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to Vietnam (Chichester, Eng., 1981)
48. Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London, 1987)
49. George Raudzens, "Firepower Limitations in Modern Military History," Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 67 (1989), 130-53
50. Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916-18 (New Haven, 1994)
51. Martin Davidson and Adam Levy, Decisive Weapons: The Technology that Transformed Warfare (Parkwest, N. Y., 1996)
52. Jeremy Black, ed., European Warfare, 1453-1815 (Houndmills, Hants., 1999)
53. and Black, Western Warfare, 1775-1882 (Bloomington, 2001)
54. Bellesiles, Arming America, 149, 144
55. Steuben, Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States (Philadelphia, 1779)
56. Anderson, Crucible of War, 318
57. Anderson, A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War (Chapel Hill, 1984), 225
58. J. K. Mahon, History of the Militia and National Guard (New York, 1983), 29
59. James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S. C., 1991), 2, 77; military records, New Jersey State Archives, Trenton; military records, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Raleigh; Military Department, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia; military papers, Georgia State Archive, Atlanta; Loudoun Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif
60. R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History From 3500 B. C. to the Present, 2d ed. (New York, 1986)
61. Don Higginbotham gives the number as 11,000 in "The Early American Way of War: Reconnaissance and Appraisal," WMQ, 3d Ser., 45 (1987), 235
62. Washington to Loudoun, Jan. 1757, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, 39 vols. (Washington, D. C., 1931-1944), 2:18-19
63. Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia, S. C., 1988)
64. Higginbotham, ed., Reconsiderations on the Revolutionary War; Selected Essays (Westport, Conn., 1978)
65. Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill, 1979)
66. Cress, Citizens in Arms
67. See particularly the outstanding dissertation by Mark Pitcavage, "An Equitable Burden: The Decline of the State Militias, 1783-1858" (Ohio State University, 1995)
68. W. J. Eccles, "The Social, Economic, and Political Significance of the Military Establishment in New France," Canadian Historical Review, 52 (1971), 1-22
69. John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York, 1983), 33
70. An Impartial Hand [John Mitchell], The Contest in America Between Great Britain and France, with its Consequences and Importance (London, 1757), 137-38
71. See for example Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut
72. Washington, "Circular to the States," Oct. 18, 1780, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Writings of George Washington, 20:209
73. Steuben, A Letter on the Subject of an Established Militia (New York, 1784), 7-8
74. See also Ira D. Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (New York, 1972), 152-53
75. Rorabaugh, Craft Apprentice, 168, 246 n. 17
76. Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, 1977)
77. See Bellesiles, "History Lesson," Guns and Ammo (November 1999)
78. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1997)
79. Rakove, ed., Interpreting the Constitution: The Debate over Original Intent (New York, 1990)
80. Rakove, "The Second Amendment: The Highest Stage of Originalism," Chicago-Kent Law Review, 76 (2000), 103-166
81. Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill, 1999)
82. John Stokes Adams, ed., An Autobiographical Sketch by John Marshall (Ann Arbor, 1937), 10
83. Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, or the New Constitution (Norwalk, Conn., 1979), 161
84. Rakove, Original Meanings
85. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 3d ed., trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London, 1995), 1