History is filled with wars. We dream the victories and defeats, great and small, and note how they have shaped our world. Wars and social movements have made our civilization as we know it. Man’s religion and past wars gives us an understanding of the present. In 1075, a militia loyal to the crown was used against the Norman rebellion. A militia in 1285, and later a Law of Trusts, reorganized the militia. In 1471, with the aid of the militia, towns in Sweden returned to reforms. The University of Uppsala was founded (1477) and printing was introduced. The civic humanist ideal of the militia was spread through Europe by the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. The militiaman in times of crisis left his civilian duties and became a soldier. When the emergency was over, he returned to his civilian status. Militias continued in England, Italy, Germany, and the United States through the Middle Ages. The first US militia was in Boston. Militias soon followed in the Colonies. Militias were valuable in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, Mexican War, and both sides of the Civil War. There was further growth into the 1900’s and on into the Present. “Thou art also victory and law When empty terrors overawe.” (Wordsworth)
History is filled with wars. We dream the victories and defeats, great and small, and note how they have shaped our world. Wars and social movements have made our civilization as we know it. Man's religion and past wars gives us an understanding of the present. In 1075, a militia loyal to the crown was used against the Norman rebellion. A militia in 1285, and later a Law of Trusts, reorganized the militia. In 1471, with the aid of the militia, towns in Sweden returned to reforms. The University of Uppsala was founded (1477) and printing was introduced. The civic humanist ideal of the militia was spread through Europe by the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. The militiaman in times of crisis left his civilian duties and became a soldier. When the emergency was over, he returned to his civilian status. Militias continued in England, Italy, Germany, and the United States through the Middle Ages. The first US militia was in Boston. Militias soon followed in the Colonies. Militias were valuable in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, Mexican War, and both sides of the Civil War. There was further growth into the 1900's and on into the Present. "Thou art also victory and law When empty terrors overawe." (Wordsworth)
For readers who love Screwtape Letters and books by Joel Rosenberg like The Copper Scroll A battle rages for the Soul of America… In the first pages, readers are placed amid a terrorist attack in Chicago and the planning of more attacks in the Homeland on a massive scale. Congress is ready to sell-out and cave to terrorist demands. Threats from the sky are looming, and a strike on Israel is imminent. How will America deal with this new axis of evil? Will they suffer the same fate as Israel in the hands of the Romans? Are we on the brink of the apocalypse prophesied more than 2,500 years ago? In this celestial chess game, people with vastly different agendas plan their next move. One side seeks to control by cunning, passion and deception. The other seeks to give people the Truth. An age-old spiritual war is taking physical dimensions. 7,000 miles from Washington D.C., in Tehran, Iran, the evilest of terrorist attacks is in the final stages of preparation. The real battle rages for people’s hearts and minds. Light versus dark, good versus evil and no setting is more perfect than modern-day America.
Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand either why militias appealed to the founding fathers or the role that militias played in North American rebellions, in which they often functioned as repressive—and racist—domestic forces. In Armed Citizens, Noah Shusterman explains for a general reader what eighteenth-century militias were and why the authors of the Constitution believed them to be necessary to the security of a free state. Suggesting that the question was never whether there was a right to bear arms, but rather, who had the right to bear arms, Shusterman begins with the lessons that the founding generation took from the history of Ancient Rome and Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of those myths during the Renaissance. He then turns to the rise of France’s professional army during seventeenth-century Europe and the fear that it inspired in England. Shusterman shows how this fear led British writers to begin praising citizens’ militias, at the same time that colonial America had come to rely on those militias as a means of defense and as a system to police enslaved peoples. Thus the start of the Revolution allowed Americans to portray their struggle as a war of citizens against professional soldiers, leading the authors of the Constitution to place their trust in citizen soldiers and a "well-regulated militia," an idea that persists to this day.
Historians depict nineteenth-century militiamen as drunken buffoons who poked each other with cornstalk weapons, and inevitably shot their commander in the backside. This book demonstrates that, to the contrary, militia remained an active civil institution in early nineteenth century, affecting era's social, political, and economic transitions.
This first study to discuss the important ideological role of the military in the early political life of the nation examines the relationship between revolutionary doctrine and the practical considerations of military planning before and after the American Revolution. Americans wanted and effective army, but they realized that by its very nature the military could destroy freedom as well as preserve it. The security of the new nation was not in dispute but the nature of republicanism itself. Originally published 1982. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
In Militias in the New Millennium, Stan Weeber and Daniel Rodeheaver examine the state of the U.S. citizen militia movement in the new millennium. Using Smelser's theory of collective behavior, the authors examine the causes, belief systems, and electronic presence of militias, and the efforts of social control agents to contain them. Tested with 1196 internet communications and supplemented with interviews with militia members, Smelser's theory of the origins and direction of radical social movements, such as militias, is mostly confirmed by data analysis.
After the bombings of Oklahoma City in 1995, most Americans were shocked to discover that tens of thousands of their fellow citizens had banded together in homegrown militias. Within the next few years, numerous studies and media reports appeared revealing the unseen world of the American militia movement, a loose alliance of groups with widely divergent views. Not surprisingly, it was the movement’s most extreme voices that attracted the lion's share of attention. In reality the militia movement was neither as irrational nor as new as it was portrayed in the press, Robert Churchill writes. What bound the movement together was the shared belief that citizens have a right, even a duty, to take up arms against wanton exercise of unconstitutional power by the federal government. Many were motivated to join the movement by what they saw as a rise in state violence, illustrated by the government assaults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, and Waco, Texas in 1993. It was this perception and the determination to deter future state violence, Churchill argues, that played the greatest role in the growth of the American militia movement. Churchill uses three case studies to illustrate the origin of some of the core values of the modern militia movement: Fries' Rebellion in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century, the Sons of Liberty Conspiracy in Civil War-era Indiana and Illinois, and the Black Legion in Michigan and Ohio during the Depression. Building on extensive interviews with militia members, the author places the contemporary militia movement in the context of these earlier insurrectionary movements that, animated by a libertarian interpretation of the American Revolution, used force to resist the authority of the federal government. A historian of early America, Robert H. Churchill has published numerous articles on American political violence and the right to keep and bear arms. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Hartford. "This book is about how we think about the past, how cultural memories are formed and evolve, and how these memories then come to impact current understandings of issues. Churchill provides an enlightening analysis of the ideology, structure, and purpose of the militia movement. Where much scholarship has categorized it as a cohesive, single movement, Churchill begins the process of unraveling its complexity." ---Steve Chermak, Michigan State University "To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face addresses an area---the relationship of American political violence to American ideology---that is of growing importance and that is commanding an ever increasing audience, and it does so in a way like nothing else in the field." ---David Williams, Indiana University Bloomington
A vigilante group is an armed private group that has taken the law into its own hands or that has the announced potential of doing so. There are quite a number of such organisations in the contemporary United States, and many have members who are said to be anti-government, racist or both. There is a strong history of vigilante activity in the United States that is unique in modern world history. In order to avoid civil disturbances, Congress and a number of state legislatures have passed laws governing the organisation, instruction and activities of private groups assembled to drill with, practice with, or demonstrate the used of firearms or explosives. This is a brief overview of those laws.
