A Genealogy of Gun Violence

12/13/23 • 51 min

The problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has its roots in the industrial revolution. Satia tells the story of British gun-maker Samuel Galton, Jr., who was called to task by his Quaker community for manufacturing rifles. As a professed pacifist, Galton had to wrestle with the large-scale uses to which his weapons were put. So where do we look for answers about how to regulate guns? Some claim the answer has to lie in the past, in the nation’s founding documents. Others argue that novel technologies demand novel solutions. Solving the problem of gun violence may be a case where we need to make a strong modernity claim.

Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Christopher Nygren, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh

Featured Scholars:

Catherine Fletcher, Professor of History, Manchester Metropolitan University

Priya Satia, Professor of History, Stanford University

Special thanks: James DeMasi, Chloé Hogg, Jonathan Lyonhart, Pernille Røge, Jennifer Waldron, Catherine Yanko

Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Christopher Nygren, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh

Featured Scholars:

Catherine Fletcher, Professor of History, Manchester Metropolitan University

Priya Satia, Professor of History, Stanford University

Special thanks: James DeMasi, Chloé Hogg, Jonathan Lyonhart, Pernille Røge, Jennifer Waldron, Catherine Yanko

Previous Episode

A Medieval Anti-Racist

What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adorno, David Orique, María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of defense – but also laid a lasting Christian groundwork for the fight against racial injustice.

Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Terence Sweeney, Assistant Teaching Professor, Honors College, Villanova University

Featured Scholars:

Rolena Adorno, Sterling Professor Emerita of Spanish, Yale University

María Cristina Ríos Espinosa, Professor of Arts, Humanities, and Culture, University of Sor Juana’s Cloister, Mexico City

David Orique, Professor of History, Providence College

Special thanks: Chiyuma Elliott, Michael Sawyer

Next Episode

The Enemy of Morality Is Not Modernity, It’s Me

The great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beginning of the modern age. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace worked more than two centuries later, in the “post-modern” style. But these two writers shared a common problem: once modernity fractured society’s sense of shared moral norms, how could you write persuasively about morality? This episode looks at how Johnson and Wallace attempted to solve this problem; what struggles plagued their solutions; and why our modern, pluralistic landscape makes their work more valuable than ever.

Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Kirsten Hall Herlin

Featured Scholars: Walter Jackson Bate (1918-1999), Professor of English, Harvard University Matt Bucher, Managing Editor, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies Jack Lynch, Professor of English, Rutgers University D. T. Max, Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Special thanks: Dutton Kearney