Why did some central African peoples embrace gun technology in the nineteenth century, and others turn their backs on it? In answering this question, The Gun in Central Africa offers a thorough reassessment of the history of firearms in central Africa. Marrying the insights of Africanist historiography with those of consumption and science and technology studies, Giacomo Macola approaches the subject from a culturally sensitive perspective that encompasses both the practical and the symbolic attributes of firearms.

Informed by the view that the power of objects extends beyond their immediate service functions, The Gun in Central Africa presents Africans as agents of technological re-innovation who understood guns in terms of their changing social structures and political interests. By placing firearms at the heart of the analysis, this volume casts new light on processes of state formation and military revolution in the era of the long-distance trade, the workings of central African gender identities and honor cultures, and the politics of the colonial encounter.

Legal and public policies concerning youth gun violence tend to rely heavily on crime reports, survey data, and statistical methods. Rarely is attention given to the young voices belonging to those who carry high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In Language of the Gun, Bernard E. Harcourt recounts in-depth interviews with youths detained at an all-malecorrectional facility, exploring how they talk about guns and what meanings they ascribe to them in a broader attempt to understand some of the assumptions implicit in current handgun policies. In the process, Harcourt redraws the relationships among empirical research, law, and public policy.

Home to over 150 repeat offenders ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, the Catalina Mountain School is made up of a particular stratum of boys—those who have committed the most offenses but will still be released upon reaching adulthood. In an effort to understand the symbolic and emotional language of guns and gun carrying, Harcourt interviewed dozens of these incarcerated Catalina boys. What do these youths see in guns? What draws them to handguns? Why do some of them carry and others not? For Harcourt, their often surprising answers unveil many of the presuppositions that influence our laws and policies.

From the Mormon Wars to the Border Wars to gangs of Bald Knobbers and Bushwhackers, Missouri’s reign of vigilante justice during the nineteenth century is unparalleled by any other state in the nation. Situated as the Gateway to the West, Missouri experienced an influx of new cultures, races, and political factions, while already home to a population of patriotic war veterans. The state marked the boundary of eastern civilization and was a stronghold of fierce independence, bordered by Bloody Kansas and Native American territories. With new lands opening for settlement, and a fledgling system of law enforcement, the people themselves were compelled to invent laws and punish transgressors. Lawmen opposed vigilantes but at times were forced to cooperate with them and adopt their methods. Missouri spawned countless stories of individual and mob violence that finally ended at the turn of the century with advancing technology and the people’s enduring insistence on decency and peace.

Necessary Evil is the first book to chronicle the implications of vigilantism in Missouri, ultimately showing that the state could never have been settled without a healthy dose of rebel justice. Packed with stories of popular gunslingers such as Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, and Jesse James, this action-filled read will be of interest to crime enthusiasts and historians alike.

In 1991 Nancy Floyd bought her first handgun.  Soon she was participating in Ladies Day at her local shooting range and reading Women & Guns magazine.  In 1993 she began interviewing and photographing women who were fellow gun owners.  In 1997 she started researching "gun women" from the past to see how they were represented in the popular imagination.  Now she has brought her work together in a riveting new book, filled with remarkable photographs and candid first-person stories, accompanied by an eye-opening illustrated history of female gun ownership in America.

Sympathetic but unsentimental, Floyd presents gun-toting women young and old, including an eleven-year-old girl competing in her first gun competition, a woman whose grandmother was killed by an intruder, and a war veteran who experienced firefights while stationed in Iraq.  Whatever you might think about gun-toting women before you open this book, your preconceptions are sure to be shattered by the end.

Examining the case that inspired a pop culture phenomenon

In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested and incarcerated for kill­ing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, Maurine Watkins, a reporter at the time, wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of the story of Annan and of Watkins’s play, Charles H. Cosgrove provides a critical examination of the crim­inal case and an exploration of the era’s social assump­tions that made the message of the play so plausible in its own time. His careful historical research challenges the received portrait of Annan as a killer who got away with murder and of Watkins as a savvy cub reporter and precocious playwright.
 
In They Both Reached for the Gun, Charles H. Cosgrove expertly combines meticulous research into inquest transcripts, police records, and interviews with Annan’s relatives with detailed analysis to shed new light on the participants, the trial, and the subsequent play and musical. Although no one will ever know what really happened in the south side apartment one hundred years ago, Cosgrove’s interrogation shows how sensationalized Watkins’s writing was. Her reporting on the Annan case perpetuated falsehoods about Annan’s so-called “confession,” and her play gave an inaccurate portrayal of Chicago’s criminal justice system. Despite Watkins’s insistence that her drama revealed the truth about its subjects without any exaggeration, her play depicted police, prosecutors, and judges as the only “good guys” in the story, ignoring those who lied, misled, and used brutal methods to obtain forced confessions.