The Gunning Of America

"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"--

From her Caribbean island birthplace, a young girl carries a dream and journeys to a new land that is at once puzzling, frightening, and inspiring. In 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. She describes a place where skyscrapers, rather than the moon, light the night; where people dress in woolens, ready for snow; where no one knows your name. Yet this same place offers exciting treasures: dizzying amusement park rides, stirring symphony concerts, flashy circus performers, towering cathedrals, and captivating art museums that speak to those who linger. Above all, this new land is place where "hope glows, a beacon / guiding ocean-deep dreamers / from storm surfs to shore."

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.

Since she left Jamaica for America after her father died, Zettie lives in a car with her mother while they both go to school and plan for a real home.

The legendary filmmaker D. W. Griffith directed nearly 200 films during 1908 and 1909, his first years with the Biograph Company. While those one-reel films are a testament to Griffith's inspired genius as a director, they also reflect a fundamental shift in film style from "cheap amusements" to movie storytelling complete with characters and narrative impetus. In this comprehensive historical investigation, drawing on films preserved by the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, Tom Gunning reveals that the remarkable cinematic changes between 1900 and 1915 were a response to the radical reorganization within the film industry and the evolving role of film in American society. The Motion Picture Patents Company, the newly formed Film Trust, had major economic aspirations. The newly emerging industry's quest for a middle-class audience triggered Griffith's early experiments in film editing and imagery. His unique solutions permanently shaped American narrative film.

A provocative history that reveals how guns—not abortion, race, or religion—are at the heart of America's cultural divide. Gunfight is a timely work examining America’s four-centuries-long political battle over gun control and the right to bear arms. In this definitive and provocative history, Adam Winkler reveals how guns—not abortion, race, or religion—are at the heart of America’s cultural divide. Using the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller—which invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation’s capital—as a springboard, Winkler brilliantly weaves together the dramatic stories of gun-rights advocates and gun-control lobbyists, providing often unexpected insights into the venomous debate that now cleaves our nation.

The theory of analytic functions of several complex variables enjoyed a period of remarkable development in the middle part of the twentieth century. After initial successes by Poincaré and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the theory encountered obstacles that prevented it from growing quickly into an analogue of the theory for functions of one complex variable. Beginning in the 1930s, initially through the work of Oka, then H. Cartan, and continuing with the work of Grauert, Remmert, and others, new tools were introduced into the theory of several complex variables that resolved many of the open problems and fundamentally changed the landscape of the subject. These tools included a central role for sheaf theory and increased uses of topology and algebra. The book by Gunning and Rossi was the first of the modern era of the theory of several complex variables, which is distinguished by the use of these methods. The intention of Gunning and Rossi's book is to provide an extensive introduction to the Oka-Cartan theory and some of its applications, and to the general theory of analytic spaces. Fundamental concepts and techniques are discussed as early as possible. The first chapter covers material suitable for a one-semester graduate course, presenting many of the central problems and techniques, often in special cases. The later chapters give more detailed expositions of sheaf theory for analytic functions and the theory of complex analytic spaces. Since its original publication, this book has become a classic resource for the modern approach to functions of several complex variables and the theory of analytic spaces. Further information about this book, including updates, can be found at the following URL: www.ams.org/publications/authors/books/postpub/chel-368.

Marriage Confidential tackles this question with bracing candor, taking us inside a world where romantic ideas have given way to a "post-romantic" mood and a fair number of marriages end up "semi-happy." It's a world where the husbands of "workhorse wives" pursue the Having It All dream that married women have abandoned; where children have migrated from the children's table to the centerpiece; and where technology, demography, and economy place unprecedented stresses on marital fidelity. Among other examples of marriage trailblazers, Haag even presents a case for how updated ideas of non-monogamy might be an option for the future. Uniquely weaving together cultural commentary, memoir, storytelling, history, and research, Marriage Confidential gives us a riveting glimpse of what the future of marriage might look like.