Download or read book Samuel Colt written by Herbert G. Houze and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating story of the American inventor and manufacturer who perfected the revolver Samuel Colt (1814-1862) first patented his "Colt" revolver in 1835 and thereby redefined the architecture of handguns. This stunning book is the first to present in detail the evolution of his most famous invention and to document the unsurpassed Colt firearms collections held by the Wadsworth Atheneum. Colt designed his revolvers with an artistic sensibility--paying particular attention to form and beauty and juxtaposing colors and finishes to heighten the visual effects. He was also one of the first American manufacturers to secure celebrity endorsements and to commission paintings by renowned artists like George Catlin to promote his arms. Colt's standards for excellence, industrial foresight, and quest for market domination are explored in light of primary documents that reveal his constant battles to protect his patents. Essays discuss Colt's personal collection of historic firearms as well as the memorial collection of Colt-manufactured firearms, the relationship between art and commerce as they pertain to the inventor's career, and his international celebrity. Richly illustrated and beautifully produced, this volume presents the artistry of the firearms that Colt worked so diligently to perfect--as well as his promotional abilities that made a tremendous impact on American culture.
Download or read book Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester written by Charles River Editors and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading Gunsmiths in early 19th century America were helped along by noted artisans from Germany, Switzerland, and other European powers, but despite advances made in the European and American musket, the requirement of an exterior spark and percussion to ignite powder for a single-shot discharge remained the paradigm. Similarly, the era was unable to move past the cumbersome weapon that required at least half a minute to reload. The military compensation for such an ungainly and vulnerable process was the alternation of troop lines, in which one fired while the other reloaded from behind. Effective as that was in laying down constant fire and simultaneous reloading, the force as a whole was disabled by a large fraction, and the reloading soldiers were vulnerable to saber attacks on horseback as well. From the bayonet of 1620 to the emergence of repeating firearms in the American Civil War, sometimes referred to as the "first truly modern war," military procedures remained largely the same, based on entrenched European customs. Napoleonic tactics were taught as mainstream at the military academies, and the musket remained in a stagnant state of evolution, but even the most tradition-bound army command was forced to give way at some point to a generation of scientist-inventors, civilian manufacturing centers, and entrepreneurs born during the Industrial Revolution. The old guard dug in its heels, and even well past the Civil War, new technologies were met with stiff resistance. High-ranking officers, drawn from the ranks of martial families steeped in the War of 1812, fended off the new scientific engineering and what they considered the waste of random firing. However, the realities of American expansionism, population redistribution, a labor movement unwilling to cede its members well-being, and the rise of the factory became impossible to ignore. The driving forces behind modern light weaponry were new disciples of mass production, interchangeable parts, and a more developed and aggressive marketing style. Evolution of the modern rifle did not provide all of its own impetus. As the ever-improving cartridge progressed from primitive paper to brass encasement, the weapons required to fire with the charge were forced to change as well. By the time weapons industrialist Samuel Colt was born, the Lewis and Clark Expedition sent to the Pacific by Thomas Jefferson had only recently returned with their report on the first overland continental journey. Outside of a small group of mountain men trapping and trading fur for European fashion magnates, few white settlers had found their way across the Great Plains. The firearms of the Revolution demonstrated little difference between a soldier's flintlock musket and a hunting weapon taken from the mantle. As the civilian entrepreneur and the soldier became increasingly interdependent, the new corporate executives of arms companies became tycoons. Mass production and increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques helped to create the national and international arms merchant, a model upon which global governments expanded. With few exceptions, the nature of the modern firearm as an everyday utility enabled these giants to arm any ideology, or both sides of any conflict. In the manner that Samuel Colt broke open the single-shot tradition in hand weapons, Oliver Fisher Winchester and his celebrated rifle shared the title of "the gun that won the West." In the arena of portable arms, these two men dominated much of the technological and promotive aspects of 19th century weaponry, alternating between resisting and collaborating with rivals. While Colt created the first effective revolver mechanism for the handgun based on the technology of the ship's wheel, it was Oliver Winchester who instituted 140 years of branding dominance by virtue of the first reliable repeating rifle.
Download or read book The Gunning of America written by Pamela Haag and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An acclaimed historian explodes the myth about the 'special relationship' between Americans and their guns, revealing that savvy 19th century businessmen--not gun lovers--created American gun culture"--
Download or read book The Winchester written by Laura Trevelyan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Details the extraordinary life of Oliver Winchester, the company, and its rapid rise and slow fall as told by a distant family descendant.”—American Gunsmith Arguably the world’s most famous firearm, the Winchester Repeating Rifle was sought after by a cast of characters ranging from the settlers of the American West to the Ottoman Empire’s Army. Laura Trevelyan, a descendant of the Winchester family, offers an engrossing personal history of the colorful New England clan responsible for the creation and manufacture of the “Gun that Won the West.” Trevelyan chronicles the rise and fortunes of a great American arms dynasty, from Oliver Winchester’s involvement with the Volcanic Arms Company in 1855 through the turbulent decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She explores the evolution of an iconic, paradigm-changing weapon that has become a part of American culture; a longtime favorite of collectors and gun enthusiasts that has been celebrated in fiction, glorified in Hollywood, and applauded in endorsements from the likes of Annie Oakley, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and Native American tribesmen who called it “the spirit gun.” “[A] detailed but accessible look at the life, times and commerce of Oliver Winchester—Trevelyan’s great great great grandfather—and his many descendants of both the human and firearms varieties . . . Whether you’re a fan of firearms or simply of American history, there is much to enjoy and learn in this easy-to-read and well-footnoted volume.”—American Shooting Journal “The book is beautifully illustrated, with fascinating photos of the Winchester family, and with well-known historical figures—including the Native American leader Geronimo and President Theodore Roosevelt—clutching their repeating rifles.”—Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book Captive of the Labyrinth written by Mary Jo Ignoffo and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captive of the Labyrinth is reissued here to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester in 1922. After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband in 1881, Winchester purchased a simple farmhouse in San José, California. She built additions to the house and continued construction for the next twenty years. When neighbors and the local press could not imagine her motivations, they invented fanciful ones of their own. She was accused of being a ghost-obsessed spiritualist, and to this day it is largely believed that the extensive construction she executed on her San José house was done to thwart death and appease the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle. Author and historian Mary Jo Ignoffo’s definitive biography unearths the truth about this reclusive eccentric, revealing that she was not a maddened spiritualist driven by remorse but an intelligent, articulate woman who sought to protect her private life amidst the chaos of her public existence and the social mores of the time. The author takes readers through Winchester’s several homes, explores her private life, and, by excerpting from personal correspondence, one learns the widow’s true priority was not dissipating her fortune on the mansion in San José but endowing a hospital to eradicate a dread disease. Sarah Winchester has been exploited for profit for over a century, but Captive of the Labyrinth finally puts to rest the myths about this American heiress, and, in the process, uncovers her true legacies.
Download or read book The Gunning of America written by Pamela Haag and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 clichéthat have created and sustained our lethal gun culture.
Download or read book Gun Barons written by John Bainbridge, Jr. and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Bainbridge, Jr.'s Gun Barons is a narrative history of six charismatic and idiosyncratic men who changed the course of American history through the invention and refinement of repeating weapons. Love them or hate them, guns are woven deeply into the American soul. Names like Colt, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and Remington are legendary. Yet few people are aware of the roles these men played at a crucial time in United States history, from westward expansion in the 1840s, through the Civil War, and into the dawn of the Gilded Age. Through personal drive and fueled by bloodshed, they helped propel the young country into the forefront of the world's industrial powers. Their creations helped save a nation divided, while planting seeds that would divide the country again a century later. Their inventions embodied an intoxicating thread of American individualism—part fiction, part reality—that remains the foundation of modern gun culture. They promoted guns not only for the soldier, but for the Everyman, and also made themselves wealthy beyond their most fevered dreams. Gun Barons captures how their bold inventiveness dwelled in the psyche of an entire people, not just in the minds of men who made firearm fortunes. Whether we revere these larger-than-life men or vilify them, they helped forge the American character.
Download or read book Inventing a Better Mousetrap written by Alan Rothschild and published by Maker Media, Inc.. This book was released on 2015-11-09 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn about the role that patent models played in American history--and even learn to build your own replica! Patent models, working models required for US patent filings from 1790 to 1880, offer insight into--and inspiration from--a period of intense technological advancement, the Industrial Revolution. The Rothschild Patent Model Collection consists of thousands of patent models, many from the 19th century. This book features the most outstanding of these patent models, and offers deep insight into the cultural, economic, and political history of the United States. This book not only catalogs hundreds of the most compelling models from the collection, but shows you how to build your own replicas of several selected models using Lego, 3D printing, and other materials and techniques.
Download or read book Revolver written by Jim Rasenberger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patented in 1836, the Colt pistol with its revolving cylinder was the first practical firearm that could shoot more than one bullet without reloading. Its most immediate impact was on the expansionism of the American west, where white emigrants and US soldiers came to depend on it, and where Native Americans came to dread it. In making the revolver, Colt also changed American manufacturing, and revolutionized industry in the United States. Rasenberger brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. During an age of promise and progress, and also of slavery, corruption, and unbridled greed, Colt not only helped to create this America, he completely embodied it.-- adapted from info provided
Download or read book Gun Country written by Andrew C. McKevitt and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2023-09-18 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as World War II transformed the United States into a global military and economic superpower, so too did it forge the gun country America is today. After 1945, war-ravaged European nations possessed large surpluses of mass-produced weapons, and American entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to buy used munitions for pennies on the dollar and resell them stateside. A booming consumer market made cheap guns accessible to millions of Americans, and rates of gun ownership and violence began to climb. Andrew C. McKevitt tells the history of this gun boom through the dynamics of consumer capitalism and Cold War ideology, the combination of which resulted in a vast number of Americans arming themselves to the teeth and centering their political identity on their guns. When gun control legislation emerged in the 1960s, many Americans, accustomed to the unregulated postwar bounty of cheap guns and fearful of Soviet invasion, domestic subversion, and urban uprisings, fiercely challenged it. Meanwhile, gun control groups were diverted from their abolitionist roots toward a conciliatory, fundraising-focused strategy that struggled to limit the stockpiling of firearms. Gun Country recasts the story of guns in postwar America as one of Cold War and racial anxieties, unfettered capitalism, and exceptional violence that continues to haunt us to this day.
Download or read book The Violence Inside Us written by Chris Murphy and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An engrossing, moving, and utterly motivating account of the human stakes of gun violence in America.”—Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Education of an Idealist Is America destined to always be a violent nation? This sweeping history by U.S. senator Chris Murphy explores the origins of our violent impulses, the roots of our obsession with firearms, and the mythologies that prevent us from confronting our national crisis. In many ways, the United States sets the pace for other nations to follow. Yet on the most important human concern—the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from physical harm—America isn’t a leader. We are disturbingly laggard. To confront this problem, we must first understand it. In this carefully researched and deeply emotional book, Senator Chris Murphy dissects our country’s violence-filled history and the role that our unique obsession with firearms plays in this national epidemic. Murphy tells the story of his profound personal transformation in the wake of the mass murder at Newtown, and his subsequent immersion in the complicated web of influences that drive American violence. Murphy comes to the conclusion that while America’s relationship to violence is indeed unique, America is not inescapably violent. Even as he details the reasons we’ve tolerated so much bloodshed for so long, he explains that we have the power to change. Murphy takes on the familiar arguments, obliterates the stale talking points, and charts the way to a fresh, less polarized conversation about violence and the weapons that enable it—a conversation we urgently need in order to transform the national dialogue and save lives.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of History of American Management written by Morgen Witzel and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-03-15 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing more than 250 entries, this unique and ambitious work traces the development of management thinking and major business culture in North America. Entries range from 600 words to 2500 words and contain concise biographical detail, a critical analysis of the thinkers' doctrines and ideas and a bibliography including the subject's major works and a helpful listing of minor works.
Download or read book Violent Screen written by Stephen Hunter and published by Bancroft Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gun buff, movie critic and bestselling author of Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter takes aim at 13 years of violence on the big screen, hitting the highlights and the lowlifes, the thrills, the chills, and the kills, with deadly precision, explosive prose and devastating good humor.
Download or read book From Stones to Nukes written by Adolf Kellenberger and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book On Target written by Noah S. Schwartz and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Rifle Association (NRA) is an important actor in the American gun debate. While popular explanations for the group’s influence often focus on the NRA’s lobbying and campaign donations, it receives lesser attention for the mass mobilization efforts that make these political endeavours possible. On Target explores why the NRA is so influential and how we can understand the group’s impact on firearms policy in the United States. The book looks at how the NRA both draws upon and shapes historical meta-narratives regarding the role of firearms in America’s national identity and how this is part of a larger effort to expand the community of gun owners. Noah S. Schwartz demonstrates how the NRA portrays a vision of the past through events such as its annual meeting; communications such as American Rifleman magazine and NRA TV; and points of contact including the National Firearms Museum. Based on fieldwork in Indiana and Virginia, including participant observation at NRA events and firearm safety classes, thematic analysis of audio-visual material, and interviews with NRA executives and members, On Target sheds light on the ways in which the NRA tells stories to build and mobilize a politically motivated network of gun owners.
Download or read book Conquerors of Time written by Trevor Fishlock and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conquerors of Time celebrates 150 years of courage, energy, innovation, resourcefulness and grand ideas, from the late 17th century to the early 20th. It's about the seafarers, engineers, inventors and trailblazers who enabled the British to hold together a vast empire and the Americans to push their frontiers west. Some, such as Captain Cook and Robert Stephenson are famous. Others, like the makers of chromonometers, the collectors of tropical plants or the railway engineers who roughed it in the Canadian wilderness are less well-known. What they all had in common is a desire to understand the world and a determination to harness the forces of nature. 'Trevor Fishlock's brio and broad vision matches those of his subjects and makes for a rattling good read.' Lawrence James, Daily Mail 'Fact-filled and highly evocative ... the sheer romance of the story is irresistible.' Sunday Telegraph
Download or read book Seven Score and Four written by Dave Spiering and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-03 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven Score and Four By: Dave Spiering How would you feel if someone wrote a biography on you and they completely misrepresented you and what was important to you? How would you respond if, when confronted, they just shrugged it off or said that was how they wanted other to interpret your life? Or what if you wrote an autobiography and someone came along and completely changed it? And what if they told everyone that their version was the one you wanted everyone to believe? For half a century, the progressive, secular modernists have been doing just that with history. Mirroring their new religious and philosophical mindset, their standard of values have been superimposed on the past. The old ideas of truth, morality, and spiritual destiny have been erased. Follow as adventurers as they go back in time and rewrite history to change the past. With careful attention to the actual lives of those in the past, Seven Score and Four paints a picture of what may have happened should humanity have time-traveling capabilities.
