American Rifle:An Interview with Alexander Rose Donald A. Yerxa We asked Alexander Rose, author of American Rifle: A Biography (Delta/Random House, 2008), to continue the discussion, begun in the November 2009 issue, of firearms in the American historical context. In addition to American Rifle, named a Book of the Year by the Economist, Rose has written Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring (Bantam, 2006) and Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History, 1066-1489 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003). He has written for the English Historical Review, 20th Century British History, the TLS, the New York Observer, Studies in Intelligence, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Invention & Technology, the National Interest, and other publications. Donald A. Yerxa: What are you attempting to do with this book? Alexander Rose: Well, from the get-go, I was determined to avoid the pitfalls and traps inherent in the "gun-book genre." There are two basic types of books about guns. First, you have the technical sort. These are extraordinarily detailed descriptions—manuals would be a better word—of a particular form or make of gun. Full of facts, they consequently lack reflection or historical context and are intended for collectors and specialists. Second, you have the analytical format, which is long on, say, the place of guns in the masculine culture of the 19th-century Western frontier, but short on technical knowledge. To their authors, a gun is just a gun, not a muzzle loader, percussion-cap, rimfire, smooth-bore, rolling block, or any of the other endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful populating what I call the mid-19th century's Big Bang in weapons technology. This is why you often find howlers in such books—conflating a bullet with a cartridge, for instance, or getting confused between a Sharps and a Spencer rifle—much to the very loud disgust of the people who write the technical sort of books. To them, getting these kinds of details wrong is like claiming that Apple Macs run on Windows. A deeper flaw of the latter type of writing, however, is that the authors often can't free themselves from the concerns and attitudes of the present. They interpret guns through the prism of their personal politics and their view of the Second Amendment. I wanted to avoid all this. American Rifle does not mention the Second Amendment, nor does it allow politics to intrude, and yet it strives to get the technical aspects right. It tells a story, one encompassing culture, economics, technology, and military history, of how America made the rifle and how the rifle made America from the colonial era onward. Click for larger view View full resolution The American Rifle Club at an international competition, Dollymount Range, Ireland. From Harper's Weekly, July 17, 1875. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-134454]. Yerxa: What prompted you to write it? Rose: It began with a long proposal to the publisher for a book focusing on the combat experiences of American soldiers. In it, I made an admittedly asinine remark along the lines of "every soldier carried a rifle," only for the publisher to propose that I write a short book on the history of the rifle before submitting the magnificent magnum opus that will one day be American Soldier: Four Battles and the Experience of Combat (or The Great Red God, I still haven't settled on a title). What was originally intended to be a six-month project turned into a two-year slog as I discovered that there was much more to the history of rifles than either the publisher or I had expected. The publisher wanted 60,000 words; I submitted 120,000, so we compromised at 150,000. Yerxa: What is a rifle? How is it different from other firearms, especially the musket? Rose: In the simplest possible terms, a rifle is rifled and a musket is not. The inside of the barrel is grooved, helically, in order to impart spin to the bullet as it hurtles from the chamber toward the muzzle. Spin in turn promotes projectile stability, enabling the bullet to...