A Right to Bear Arms?: The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment

This collection of essays explores the way history itself has become a contested element within the national legal debate about firearms.

The debate over the Second Amendment has unveiled new and useful information about the history of guns and their possession and meaning in the United States of America. History itself has become contested ground in the debate about firearms and in the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Specifically this collection of essays gives special attention to the important and often overlooked dimension of the applications of history in the law. These essays illustrate the complexity of the firearms debate, the relation between law and behavior, and the role that historical knowledge plays in contemporary debates over law and policy. Wide-ranging and stimulating The Right to Bear Arms is bound to captivate both historians and casual readers alike.

BARTON C HACKER is currently senior curator in armed forces history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. His publications include Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the American Civil War (2016), A Companion to Women’s Military History (2012), Science in Uniform, Uniforms in Science: Historical Studies of American Military and Scientific Interactions (2007), American Military Technology (2006, 2007), and Materializing the Military (2005). JENNIFER TUCKER is Associate Professor of History and Science in Society at Wesleyan University and a specialist on British technology, law, photography, and media. She is the author of Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Photography and Law (forthcoming). MARGARET VINING is curator of armed forces history in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. and a specialist in American women’s military history, military material culture, and the social sciences in the Great War. Her publications include A Companion to Women’s Military History (2012), Science in Uniform, Uniforms in Science: Historical Studies of American Military and Scientific Interactions (2007). and American Military Technology (2006, 2007).