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    Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie
    Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie
    Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie
    Ebook508 pages7 hours

    Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie

    By Clayton E. Cramer

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "For many Americans, guns seem to be a fundamental part of the American experience?and always have been."

    Grand in scope, rigorous in research, and elegant in presenting the formative years of our country, Armed America traces the winding historical trail of United States citizens' passion for firearms. Author and historial Clayton E. Cramer goes back to the source, unearthing first-hand accounts from the colonial times, through the Revolutionary War period, and into the early years of the American Republic.

    In Armed America, Cramer depicts a budding nation dependent on its firearms not only for food and protection, but also for recreation and enjoyment. Through newspaper clippings, official documents, and personal diaries, he shows that recent grandiose theories claiming that guns were scarce in early America are shaky at best, and downright false at worst. Above all, Cramer allows readers a priceless glimpse of a country literally fighting for its identity.

    For those who think that our citizens' attraction to firearms is a recent phenomenon, it's time to think again. Armed America proves that the right to bear arms is as American as apple pie.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Nelson
    Release dateAug 24, 2009
    ISBN9781418551872
    Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie

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    • 5/5
      This book was a necessary response to fraudster Michael Bellesiles' tendentious "Arming America", where Bellesiles deliberately misinterpreted historical data to claim that guns weren't common in early America. Clayton Cramer was one of the historians who uncovered Bellesiles' fraud, and wrote this book to set the record straight.However, this book isn't just a refutation of Bellesiles. It's also an entertaining slice of early American history in its own right. Just like other books which focus on foods, this book is a "vertical history" (though shorter than many) focusing on guns over a 200-plus year slice of American history. To show that guns were common throughout the period, Cramer covers a wide variety of conflicts, from Indian wars to slave revolts to political conflict within the colonies to interpersonal conflicts between the colonists. This results in a rather broad coverage of social and political history of a period that normally gets glossed over - most school history skips from 1622 (when the Indians bailed out the Plymouth colonists) to 1756 (when the French and Indian Wars started) with just a paragraph or two reciting who established each colony and why. Due to the focus of this book, it doesn't provide broad coverage of the history of that time, but it does a lot more than most. The book also continues into the Revolutionary War, where one gets a better sense of the logistics of the war (for the battle buff, the period is otherwise well-covered, of course) as Cramer tracks down how the Continental Army and its supporting militias armed themselves. The last part of the book tracks guns through the Early Republic period, and doesn't shy away from noticing that much use of the militia away from the frontier was in chasing down escaped and rebelling slaves, but shows that militias, and guns, had far more uses than those.Given the circumstances surrounding the writing of this book, it's understandable that it refers back to Bellesiles' book (and earlier paper) to specifically contradict the claims made. However, this would be a stronger book if all the material referring to Bellesiles and "Arming America" were tucked away in a foreword or afterword, leaving the history to stand on its own, and allowing those who are interested in the controversy to look it all up in one place without interrupting the narrative flow of this fascinating history.

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    Armed America - Clayton E. Cramer

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