Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America

Product Description
A “gripping,” (Booklist) “clear-eyed, and honest” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of Samuel Colt—the inventor of the legendary Colt revolver (a.k.a. six-shooter)—which changed the US forever, triggering the industrial revolution and the settlement of the American West.
Patented in 1836, the Colt pistol with its revolving cylinder was the first practical firearm that could shoot more than one bullet without reloading. For many reasons, Colt’s gun had a profound effect on American history. Its most immediate impact was on the expansionism of the American west, where white emigrants and US soldiers came to depend on it, and where Native Americans came to dread it. The six-shooter became the iconic weapon of gun-slingers, outlaws, and cowboys—some willing to pay $500 out west for a gun that sold for $25 back east.
In making the revolver, Colt also changed American manufacturing—his factory revolutionized industry in the United States. Ultimately, Colt and his gun-making brought together the two most significant forces of change before the Civil War—the industrial revolution in the east, Manifest Destiny in the west.
“Written with a journalist’s sense of color and a historian’s eye for the revealing detail” (
The Wall Street Journal),
Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his forty-seven years, he seemingly lived five lives: he traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplied the Union Army with the guns they needed to win the Civil War. Colt lived during an age of promise and progress, but also of slavery, corruption, and unbridled greed, and he not only helped to create this America, he completely embodied it. By the time he died in 1862 in Hartford, Connecticut, he was one of the most famous men in nation, and one of the richest.
“Offering a panoramic view of American culture during Colt’s life” (
LA Review of Books)
Revolver is a “rollicking and informative account [that] will delight American history buffs” (
Publishers Weekly).
Review
“The story of how Colt raised himself from frontier huckster to great American industrialist is the subject of Jim Rasenberger’s lively and balanced new book,
Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America. Rasenberger’s narrative is, to a surprising degree, the story of America in the first half of the 19th century. It overflows with relentless ambition, energy, entrepreneurship, ingenuity and wealth, and with deceit, fraud, jingoism and murder.” —
Washington Post
“[Colt's] missteps are as fascinating as his accomplishments, as described in
Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America. Cleareyed and honest, Rasenberger portrays a complicated figure who combined real mechanical insight with a talent for hucksterism...
Revolver is rewarding biography, highlighting Colt’s place in the history of industrialization.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“Colt may have lived only 47 years, but he managed to pack in multiple lives during that brief span...Few will get much closer than Mr. Rasenberger has to this singular character...
Revolver, written with a journalist’s sense of color and a historian’s eye for the revealing detail, is an exceptional biography of an archetypal 19th-century American inventor and businessman.” —
The Wall Street Journal
“Offering a panoramic view of American culture during Colt’s life, Rasenberger covers everything from bad poetry and cholera epidemics to the politics of slavery and Western expansion…Like most technologies, Colt’s revolving firearms did not take off until they found users, and it’s here that Rasenberger’s account most excels…
Revolver helps us see…how Colt’s story and the story of his methods fit within the United States’s own imperial ambitions.” —
LA Review of Books
“Rasenberger deftly brings to life the man and his times in t