In Armed Citizens, Noah Shusterman explains for a general reader what eighteenth-century militias were and why the authors of the Constitution believed them to be necessary to the security of a free state. Suggesting that the question was never whether there was a right to bear arms, but rather, who had the right to bear arms, Shusterman begins with the lessons that the founding generation took from the history of Ancient Rome and Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of those myths during the Renaissance. He then turns to the rise of France’s professional army during seventeenth-century Europe and the fear that it inspired in England. Shusterman shows how this fear led British writers to begin praising citizens’ militias, at the same time that colonial America had come to rely on those militias as a means of defense and as a system to police enslaved peoples. Thus the start of the Revolution allowed Americans to portray their struggle as a war of citizens against professional soldiers, leading the authors of the Constitution to place their trust in citizen soldiers and a "well-regulated militia," an idea that persists to this day.
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9780813944616
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Publication Date: 09-01-2020
Pages: 288
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range: 18 Years
About the Author
Noah Shusterman, Associate Professor of History at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, is author of The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics.
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