Pamela Haag

Award-Winning Author and Essayist

The Widow and the Winchester

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February 1, 2019:
“The Widow and the Winchester”
When Sarah Winchester’s husband died, she inherited millions from the family business: the manufacture of the famous Winchester Rifle. A medium reportedly told Sarah that she would be haunted by the victims of that rifle unless she used her fortune to build a house, and never stop building. That’s exactly what she did.
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Thom Hartmann Show

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rtMay 14, 2016: Tonight’s Rumble discusses how Bernie, the crazy Socialist is enslaving our children, Obama supporting making Election Day a national holiday, and how there are now more homeless kids and parents in D.C. than homeless single adults. Thom discusses the business and the making of American gun culture with historian Pamela Haag, author of the new book “The Gunning of America.” Read full article…

Time Magazine

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June 16, 2016:
“The permeable boundary between military and commercial firearms has a long history in our gun culture. After the Orlando shooting, many Americans are questioning why assault-style weapons are commercially available in the United States.”
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History News Network

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May 22, 2016:
A Connecticut judge has ruled that the families of the Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting can gather facts to develop a civil action against Remington, the parent company for the Bushmaster AR-15 used by shooter Adam Lanza. If their case goes to trial, it would be a landmark challenge to the 2005 legislation that shields the gun industry from civil liability.
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Politico America

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May 15, 2016:
“The fight over gun control is often cast politically as a conflict between government and the interests of private citizens and companies. “She hates us, and she’s coming for every bit of our freedom,” National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March about Hillary Clinton’s gun control position.
It wasn’t always like this. In fact, it was the government that first incubated the American gun industry, and the icons of the American gun culture—including Winchester and Colt—thereafter developed a commercial market out of what had started as the public-private business of providing for the common defense. This public-private separation is at the root of our modern gun politics.”
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Campaign for the American Reader

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May 9, 2016:
“As luck would have it, page 99 of The Gunning of America points the reader right toward my biggest authorial challenge in the book—but also one of its singularities and unique contributions. The first half of the page describes the demise of Benjamin Tyler Henry, the embattled genius inventor of the fearsome repeater rifle that, before too long, will be renamed from the “Henry” rifle to the now-iconic “Winchester” rifle, in honor of its capitalist and manufacturer rather than its maker. Like other aspiring mechanics and Yankee inventors of his day, Henry had been “’wealthy several times,’ his obituary notes, and poor just as often.” But here, on this page, we’re seeing how the power is shifting in 1866 from the creative inventor with creative talent but no capital toward the industrialist, Oliver Winchester, who had capital but not creative talent.”
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Salon.com

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April 30, 2016:
“An abridged history of the American gun culture, told from legend and popular memory, might go like this: We were born a gun culture. Americans have an exceptional, unique, and timeless relationship to guns, starting with the militias of the Revolutionary War, and it developed on its own from there.”
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Huffington Post

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April 26, 2016:
“In her previous book, Marriage Confidential: Love in the Post-Romantic Age, Haag took aim at “semi-happy” marriages and explored how to recast them. In this one, she focuses on combat of a different kind. Haag delves into the history of the gun industry (Winchester, Colt) and explains how over the past 150 years it has shrewdly created a demand for its products. Rather than framing the debate about guns as a Second Amendment question, Haag argues that it is a business — and one in need of strong economic regulation.”
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Kera

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June 1, 2016:
“The Second Amendment states that people have the right “to keep and bear arms.” This hour, we’ll talk about how many Americans have interpreted that right as a directive – and about how gun manufacturers have marketed their products throughout our nation’s history – with Pamela Haag.”
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OPB TV

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May 4, 2016:“Most conversations about guns in America follow lines as deeply entrenched as wagon ruts on the Oregon Trail. They focus on the second amendment — on gun control and gun rights — on who should be able to buy what kinds of guns. Historian Pamela Haag set out to do something very different in her new book, “The Gunning of America.””
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Radio West

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April 29, 2016:
Historian Pamela Haag says there’s a mythology around American gun culture. The conventional wisdom is that since the Revolutionary War we’ve had some primal bond with our firearms. But Haag argues that our guns were once just another tool of everyday life, and that the gun industry convinced us we needed to be armed. In a new book, she follows the rise of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and the marketing campaign she says created our gun culture. Haag joins us Friday to tell the story.
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The Jefferson Exchange

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April 26, 2016:
“Guns have certainly been a part of American society since the very beginning; just the existence of the Second Amendment is proof of that. But there’s a debate to be had about the relative importance of guns over the last two centuries. Historian Pamela Haag argues that guns became more important to people through effective marketing campaigns.”
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Wall Street Journal

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April 22, 2016:
“Oliver Winchester started his career in 1848 as a men’s shirt manufacturer. He did well enough that, by 1855, he could afford to invest in a fledgling New Haven firm called the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company—and start to shift over to the gun business, where his name became famous.”
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Publishers Weekly

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March 21, 2016:
“What does a haunted house in America have to do with gun control? This question animates Pamela Haag’s newest book The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (April 19), a history of the gun business in the late 19th century focused on the Winchester family.”
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CBS News

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March 13, 2016:
“No other developed country embraces firearms the way ours does. The more we argue about them, the more it seems their mystique grows. But just how guns became part of our cultural DNA has been a long journey. And that is where Lee Cowan begins.”
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Campaign for The American Reader

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May 9, 2016:
“As luck would have it, page 99 of The Gunning of America points the reader right toward my biggest authorial challenge in the book—but also one of its singularities and unique contributions. The first half of the page describes the demise of Benjamin Tyler Henry, the embattled genius inventor of the fearsome repeater rifle that, before too long, will be renamed from the “Henry” rifle to the now-iconic “Winchester” rifle, in honor of its capitalist and manufacturer rather than its maker. Like other aspiring mechanics and Yankee inventors of his day, Henry had been “’wealthy several times,’ his obituary notes, and poor just as often.” But here, on this page, we’re seeing how the power is shifting in 1866 from the creative inventor with creative talent but no capital toward the industrialist, Oliver Winchester, who had capital but not creative talent.”
Read full article…

Wall Street Journal

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The Commercial Origins of American Gun Culture April 22, 2016: “Oliver Winchester started his career in 1848 as a men’s shirt manufacturer. He did well enough that, by 1855, he could afford to invest in a fledgling New Haven firm called the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company—and start to shift over to the gun business, where his name became famous.”
www.wsj.com