Book Review: Armed America by Clayton Cramer 300 pages 2006

Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie by Clayton E. Cramer 300 pages, published in 2006 by Nelson Current.  Currently available at Barnes & Noble for $17.99 paperback and $7.49 ebook.

In 1996, a professor of history at Emory University, Michael A. Bellesiles, published a paper in the Journal of American History which upended traditional thought on guns in American history. The paper claimed guns were not common in the colonial period or in the early Republic, at least before the Mexican War. It was marketing by Samuel Colt and inexpensive firearms after the Civil War pushed inexpensive firearms onto the market. White on White violence was low in the absence of firearms.  Four years later, Bellesiles  published a book with the same theme: Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.  From Armed America:

Throughout American History , opined Bellesiles, the militia was ineffective; in the Colonial Period, the government tightly regulated gun ownership and use; guns were very scarce before 1840; there was essentially no civilian market for handguns before 1848; violence between whites was rare; few Americans hunted until the 1830s when members of the upper class sought to imitate their British equivalents. 

Clayton E. Cramer was working on his masters theses on concealed weapons regulation in the early Republic when the paper came out. It did not comport with his research, at least in the South. When the Bellesiles book was published, Cramer was mystified. Where were the sources which Bellesiles claimed to have found, which reversed the understanding of Cramer and generations of historians before him?  Cramer had read many of the sources Bellesiles used from the early Republic.

Cramer started checking the original sources. Not only did the sources not say what Bellesiles claimed they said; often they said the opposite of what Bellesiles claimed in his book.

Those who wish the population disarmed were overjoyed. The individual right to arms was a fiction. In 2001, Bellesiles was awarded with the Bancroft Prize (the highest award for an American History Book).

It was a pack of lies. Clayton Cramer became a prominent critic among many others, who pointed out the fraud at the heart of Bellesiles' "Arming America". Eventually, Bellesiles resigned his tenured position. Columbia University did the unthinkable: they revoked the Bancroft Prize and asked Bellesiles to return the prize money. 

Armed America is the book Clayton Cramer wrote to show the real history of how common firearms were in colonial America and in the early Republic. It is an academic work, but reads with an easy familiarity. There are 35 pages of notes detailing the original sources for the information. The scholarship is extremely well done. The book travels from guns in the colonial era, to guns in the hands of the Indian tribes, to militias, hunting, and the ubiquity of firearms in the accounts of travelers in the early Republic. Sadly, violence was not rare among Whites.  It was common and commonly remarked upon.

The book is well worth reading as a resource to understand the American love affair with firearms, and to show how those who wish a disarmed population are willing to lie, and to fraudulently revise history in an Orwellian fashion to obtain their objective.

©2023 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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