Papers presented by Tracy Barnett since 2019
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
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Tracy Barnett, University of Georgia
2022 Mexico City
"Selling White Supremacy: The Domestic Arms Trade in Antebellum America"
Tracy Barnett, University of Georgia
Abstract:
In the twenty-first century, guns have become ubiquitous and polarizing elements of America’s cultural and political landscape. The twenty-four-hour news cycle is filled with reports of mass shootings, urban violence, police brutality, spiking suicide rates, and civilians’ seemingly insatiable demand for more guns and more ammunition. Modern America, many have concluded, has a distinctive ‘gun culture.’ The origin of this current crisis is debated by journalists, politicians, and the public alike, but historians have been more reticent to enter the fray. It is nevertheless important to understand firearms as historically significant objects that are intimately woven into the political, social, cultural, and economic fabric of the nation. Centered on the Colt Patent Firearm Manufacturing Company, this paper explores the link between firearms—items mass produced in northeastern Yankee factories—and the South’s oppressive racial regime. In 1859, Amos H. Colt began working for his distant cousin, Samuel Colt, the famous (or infamous) firearms manufacture based in Hartford, Connecticut. Amos was tasked with a difficult and delicate assignment: selling northern guns to white southern men on the eve of Civil War. Northeastern gun manufacturers—such as Samuel Colt—sought to sell their wares on unregulated markets and participated in the manufacturing of white supremacy both before and after the American Civil War. The amorality of American manufacturers—and the banality with which they sold their lethal products to southerners—directly contributed to American gun violence and the deaths of African Americans.