Revolver: Sam Colt and the SixShooter That Changed America
(Scribner, $30)
In 47 short years, Samuel Colt “managed to pack in multiple lives,” said Alexander Rose in The Wall Street Journal. The inventor of the six-cylinder revolver was also a sailor, a laughinggas pitchman, and a sideshow performer, and though his missteps outnumber his triumphs, “he ranks up there with P.T. Barnum in his facility for self-invention, self-exculpation, and self-obfuscation.” In this exceptional new biography, author Jim Rasenberger unfolds Colt’s story “with a journalist’s sense of color and a historian’s eye for the revealing detail.”
“The revolver is as iconic for Americans as the longbow is for the English and Welsh,” said T.J. Stiles in The New York Times. “Synonymous with the ‘American System’ of manufacturing interchangeable parts,” it also ushered in our era of “technologically amplified violence.“Colt didn’t effect
this revolution alone. Born in 1814, he was the son of a Hartford, Conn., textile-mill manager, which put him at a center of massproduction innovation. While sailing the world at 16 aboard a merchant vessel, he carved a model of a multichambered handgun. He spent three years touring the U.S. to raise funds, then began production. His first company failed. Then a Texas Ranger proposed a crucial design tweak, and, crucially, he hired a highly talented machinist who perfected the production process. Sales to the government surged.
Ultimately, demand made Colt’s guns matter, and “it’s here that Rasenberger’s account most excels,” said Lee Vinsel in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He makes plain that the guns weren’t just engineering marvels; they are weapons that white settlers and the U.S. military used to kill nonwhite people. Comanche archers previously could shoot 20 arrows in the time it took a white foe to fire a muzzle-loaded weapon. The Colt six-shooter obliterated that edge and enabled a wholesale slaughter of Native Americans. We can marvel at the ingenuity and impact of Colt and his less-heralded partners. They helped make the U.S. a major economic power. Still, the story of their successes is “inextricably tied to conquest, empire, and colonialism.”