The long and rich history of Maine's firearm industry is a story of highly skilled Yankee gunsmiths, inventors, colorful characters, and entrepreneurs. It is also a story that adds to our understanding of Maine's industrial history and the significant role of Maine's gunmakers during the Indian wars, the Industrial Revolution, and the Civil War. With over 400 illustrations and extensive appendices, Maine Made Guns & Their Makers is an invaluable resource for the collector or anyone interested in Maine's extraordinary history.

The long and rich history of Maine's firearm industry is a story of highly skilled Yankee gunsmiths, inventors, colorful characters, and entrepreneurs.

Founded in 1836, the Maine State Museum is America’s oldest state museum and is known to many as “Maine’s Smithsonian” because of the breadth and diversity of its holdings—nearly a million objects covering every aspect of the state’s cultural, biological, and geological history—and the thousands of stories its collections tell. For this book the museum selected and photographed 112 artifacts and specimens that, together, tell an epic story of the land and its people from prehistoric times to the present. It is a story covering 395 million years, a story told with a walrus skull and fossils, tourmaline and spear points, mammoth tusks and bone fishhooks, Norse coins and caulking irons, militia flags and survey stakes, treaty documents and wooden tankards, a temperance banner and a locomotive, Joshua Chamberlain’s pistol and a cod tub trawl, a Lombard log hauler and a woman’s WWII welding outfit, L. L. Bean boots and German POW snowshoes, and many more objects from the museum’s collections. Short narratives written by museum curators are woven around each item—including photos of related objects—and the ensemble has been honed, polished, and introduced by museum director Bernard Fishman. This is a book that historians and Maine residents and visitors will delve into again and again, unearthing new treasures with each reading.

This provocative book debunks the myth that American gun culture was intentionally created by gun makers and demonstrates that gun ownership and use have been a core part of American society since our colonial origins. Revisionist historians argue that American gun culture and manufacturing are relatively recent developments. They further claim that widespread gun violence was largely absent from early American history because guns of all types, and especially handguns, were rare before 1848. According to these revisionists, American gun culture was the creation of the first mass production gun manufacturers, who used clever marketing to sell guns to people who neither wanted nor needed them. However, as proven in this first scholarly history of "gun culture" in early America, gun ownership and use have in fact been central to American society from its very beginnings. Lock, Stock, and Barrel: The Origins of American Gun Culture shows that gunsmithing and gun manufacturing were important parts of the economies of the colonies and the early republic and explains how the American gun industry helped to create our modern world of precision mass production and high wages for workers.

Pullen explores renowned military hero Joshua Chamberlain's later life through the lens of his Civil War experiences. 24 illustrations.

The early French Wars (1689-1748) in North America saw provincial soldiers, or British white settlers, in Massachusetts and New Hampshire fight against New France and her Native American allies with minimal involvement from England. Most British officers and government officials viewed the colonial soldiers as ill-disciplined, unprofessional, and incompetent: General John Forbes called them “a gathering from the scum of the worst people.” Taking issue with historians who have criticized provincial soldiers’ battlefield style, strategy, and conduct, Steven Eames demonstrates that what developed in early New England was in fact a unique way of war that selectively blended elements of European military strategy, frontier fighting, and native American warfare. This new form of warfare responded to and influenced the particular challenges, terrain, and demography of early New England. Drawing upon a wealth of primary materials on King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, Dummer’s War, and King George’s War, Eames offers a bottom-up view of how war was conducted and how war was experienced in this particular period and place. Throughout Rustic Warriors, he uses early New England culture as a staging ground from which to better understand the ways in which New Englanders waged war, as well as to provide a fuller picture of the differences between provincial, French, and Native American approaches to war.

Beginning with Native American primitive weaponry, The Peacemakers presents a comprehensive panorama from Lewis and Clark and their historic expedition, through subsequent trailblazing explorers, traders and mountain men, to the Army, the gold and silver miners, gunfighters, gamblers, outlaws, frontier madams and their soiled doves, to peace officers, cowboys and ranchers, as well as sodbusters, shopkeepers and the agents of Wells Fargo, hunters and gentlemen-sportsmen, Wild West showmen and women, to the Western stars of stage, screen, radio, and television. A final chapter provides insights and revelations on collecting arms and related treasures of the frontier. Designed as a companion volume to the bestselling Winchester: An American Legend and Colt: An American Legend, The Peacemakers matches those award-winning books with a fresh and breathtaking look at the extraordinary variety of Western arms. In stark contrast to the primitive Native American weapons of the time, the mechanical marvels of the time changed the course of history. These weapons were created by Colt, Winchester, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin, Sharps, Henry Deringer, Hawken, the U.S. armories and subcontractors, and small-shop private gunmakers. This book also includes other weapons of the era, like the ubiquitous Bowie knife, and more-many elegantly embellished knives including some by Tiffany & Co. Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for hunters and firearms enthusiasts. We publish books about shotguns, rifles, handguns, target shooting, gun collecting, self-defense, archery, ammunition, knives, gunsmithing, gun repair, and wilderness survival. We publish books on deer hunting, big game hunting, small game hunting, wing shooting, turkey hunting, deer stands, duck blinds, bowhunting, wing shooting, hunting dogs, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

A former editor at the New York Times examines the war over gun control in America and the rigid and intolerant ideologies that have informed the debate on both sides for more than 50 years. 20,000 first printing.