John Taliaferro Thompson had a mission: to develop a lightweight, fast-firing weapon that would help Americans win on the battlefield. His Thompson submachine gun could deliver a hundred bullets in a matter of seconds—but didn't find a market in the U.S. military. Instead, the Tommy gun became the weapon of choice for a generation of bootleggers and bank-robbing outlaws, and became a deadly American icon. Following a bloody decade—and eighty years before the mass shootings of our own time—Congress moved to take this weapon off the streets, igniting a national debate about gun control. Critically-acclaimed author Karen Blumenthal tells the fascinating story of this famous and deadly weapon—of the lives it changed, the debate it sparked, and the unprecedented response it inspired.
One gunshot by a single person could be powerful enough to move a whole nation. Well known are the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, William McKinley, and Martin Luther King Jr., and their long-lasting consequences. History, however, is littered with lesser-known gunshots that have had equally echoing outcomes. Some were small mistakes or misjudgments, others intentional acts that sparked events documented in our history textbooks. A single bullet serves as the catalyst for each of the stories in this book. We may or may not know who fired it but we know each bullet's end point and the effects it had on America's trajectory: the wars, social movements, and political and economic paradigm shifts. The names of those involved may not to many be recognizable but the events their acts precipitated are etched in American history.
Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent and readable stories, full of detail about US imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. The book contains essays on acts of US imperialism, from the 1953 Iran coup to the 2019 ousting of Evo Morales in Bolivia. Despite all this, Washington Bullets is a book about possibilities, about hope, about genuine heroes. Washington Bullets is a book infused with this madness, the madness that dares to invent the future.
Sometimes going forward means looking back. Megan Blaising has served in various low-performing schools and provides us with detailed accounts of the challenges the students faced while attempting to acquire an education. Her experience there was transformative. With painstaking detail, Blaising reflects on the "oddly-comforting" sounds of gunshots early in the morning and why late night calls have her fearing another life has been lost. But she doesn't seek a movement against social unfairness. In truth, Blaising uses her memories and the diverse students who inhabit them as a way to show that educational institutions should be a place of consistency, protection, and empathy. While good intention is rife within our society, it is often met by powerful, negative forces seeking to keep the status quo intact. In this groundbreaking memoir, Blaising examines the lingering effect of discrimination and the way it has impacted our schools, students, and current societal constructs. Question: How can one fully develop and function when living in a constant state of uncertainty and fear? Answer: They cannot. Blaising challenges the current educational system to address the why behind students' behavior instead of the behavior itself.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING FOLLOW-UP TO AMERICAN SNIPER Join Chris Kyle on a journedy to discover “how 10 firearms changed United States history” (New York Times Book Review) Drawing on his legendary firearms knowledge and combat experience, U.S. Navy SEAL and #1 bestselling author of American Sniper Chris Kyle dramatically chronicles the story of America—from the Revolution to the present—through the lens of ten iconic guns and the remarkable heroes who used them to shape history: the American long rifle, Spencer repeater, Colt .45 revolver, Winchester 1873 rifle, Springfield M1903 rifle, M1911 pistol, Thompson submachine gun, M1 Garand, .38 Special police revolver, and the M16 rifle platform Kyle himself used. American Gun is a sweeping epic of bravery, adventure, invention, and sacrifice. Featuring a foreword and afterword by Taya Kyle and illustrated with more than 100 photographs, this new paperback edition features a bonus chapter, “The Eleventh Gun,” on shotguns, derringers, and the Browning M2 machine gun.
In Bullets Not Ballots, Jacqueline L. Hazelton challenges the claim that winning "hearts and minds" is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. Hazelton argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites. Hazelton offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions—the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the Salvadoran Civil War—to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing how compellence works in intrastate conflicts, Bullets Not Ballots makes clear that whether or not the international community decides these human, moral, and material costs are acceptable, responsible policymaking requires recognizing the actual components of counterinsurgent success—and the limited influence that external powers have over the tactics of counterinsurgent elites.
An award-winning journalist’s dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future On the last evening of summer in 2013, five shots rang out in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the area had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings there weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock. Terrance Roberts was a revered anti-gang activist. His attempts to bring peace to his community had won the accolades of both his neighbors and the state’s most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun? In The Holly, the award-winning Denver-based journalist Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events that left a local gang member paralyzed and Roberts facing the possibility of life in prison. Much more than a crime story, The Holly is a multigenerational saga of race and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. With a cast that includes billionaires, elected officials, cops, developers, and street kids, the book explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens. It also probes the fraught relationships between police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex–gang members as they struggle to put their pasts behind them. In The Holly, we see how well-intentioned efforts to curb violence and improve neighborhoods can go badly awry, and we track the interactions of law enforcement with gang members who conceive of themselves as defenders of a neighborhood. When Roberts goes on trial, the city’s fault lines are fully exposed. In a time of national reckoning over race, policing, and the uses and abuses of power, Rubinstein offers a dramatic and humane illumination of what’s at stake.
On July 23, 1968, police in Cleveland battled with black nationalists in a night of terror that saw 6 people killed and at least 15 wounded. The gun battle touched off days of heavy rioting. The question was whether the shootings were the result of a planned attack on white police, or a matter of self-defense by the nationalists. Mystery still surrounds how the urban warfare started and the role the FBI might have played in its origin. The confrontation was surprising given that Cleveland had just elected Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a major US city, who just four months earlier had kept peace in Cleveland the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Now his credibility and reputation lay in tatters--the leader of the black nationalists, Fred Ahmed Evans, had used Cleveland NOW! public funds to buy the rifles and ammunition used in the shootout. Ballots and Bullets looks at the roots of the violence and its political aftermath in Cleveland, a uniquely important city in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Cleveland to raise money during his 1963 Birmingham campaign. A year later, Malcolm X appeared in the same east side church to deliver his most important speech: "The Ballot or the Bullet." Dr. King represented integration, nonviolence and his Christian heritage; Malcolm X represented racial separation, armed self-defense and the Black Muslims. Fifty years later, the specter of race violence and police brutality still haunts the United States. The War on Poverty gave way to mass incarceration, and recently the Black Lives Matter revolution has been met by the alt-right counterrevolution. Answers are needed.
