American Rifle - Alexander Rose [220]
6. The first officers to carry rifles into battle were apparently those of the British 95th Regiment during the Napoleonic Wars. See M. Urban, Rifles: Six Years with Wellington’s Legendary Sharpshooters (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 31.
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7. John Adams to Abigail Adams, June 17, 1775, in C. F. Adams, ed., Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution, with a Memoir of Mrs. Adams (1875; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), pp. 65–66. Further, the rifle “was little known in New England, and it may be said to have been confined to Pennsylvania and the colonies south, particularly to the western or border regions.” See J.W. Wright, “The Rifle in the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 29, no. 2 (1924), p. 294.
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8. R. Held, The Age of Firearms: An Illustrated History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), pp. 24–25.
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9. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America, pp. 40–41.
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10. G. Raudzens, “Outfighting or Outpopulating? Main Reasons for Early Colonial Conquests, 1493–1788,” in Raudzens, ed., Technology, Disease and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Essays Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories (Leiden [The Netherlands]: Brill, 2001), p. 41, curiously asserts that the Spaniards “seem to have had a rather higher proportion of advanced technology guns than was common in European armies in the 1490s.” However, not only did the newcomers have relatively few firearms, but the ones they did have were primitive by European standards.
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11. K. Hearn, “First Known Gunshot Victim in Americas Discovered,” National Geographic News, June 19, 2007; J.N. Wilford, “Earliest Gunshot Victim in New World Is Reported,” New York Times, June 20, 2007, p. A15.
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12. See, for instance, D. Cahill, “The Long Conquest: Collaboration by Native Andean Elites in the Colonial System, 1532–1825,” in Raudzens, Technology, Disease and Colonial Conquests, pp. 85–126.
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13. H. P. Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1922–36), pp. 2:97–100.
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14. P. M. Malone, “Changing Military Technology Among the Indians of Southern New England, 1600–1677,” American Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1973), p. 52; A. Starkey, “Conflict and Synthesis: Frontier Warfare in North America, 1513–1815,” in G. Raudzens, Technology, Disease and Colonial Conquests, p. 64.
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15. W. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. S. E. Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 207.
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16. W. Byrd, “History of the Dividing Line” (1728), in The Writings of Colonel William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esq., ed. J. S. Bassett, (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901), pp. 97–98.
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17. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, p. 56.
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18. Malone, “Changing Military Technology,” pp. 53–57.
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19. Quoted in C. P. Russell, Firearms, Traps, and Tools of the Mountain Men (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 40, cited in L. A. Garavaglia and C. G. Worman, Firearms of the American West (1803–1865, 1866–1894) (1984; reprint, Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997–98), pp. 1:7–9.
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20. R. F. Rosenberger and C. Kaufmann, The Longrifles of Western Pennsylvania: Allegheny and Westmoreland Counties (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), p. xx.
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21. Quoted in Malone, “Changing Military Technology,” p. 61.
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22. S. L. Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder: The Development of Nitrocellulose as a Military Explosive, 1845–1929 (Unpub. Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1988), pp. 23–25. See also esp. J. Leander Bishop, E.T. Freedley, and E. Young, A History of Manufactures from 1608 to 1860 (Philadelphia: Edward Young & Co., 1864), p. 2:23n1; and A. P. Van Gelder and H. Schlatter, History of the Explosives Industry in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), pp. 14–15, 29–30.
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23. Van Gelder and Schlatter,