Jim Rasenberger

“The London press often regaled readers with hair-raising stories from California and other western parts of America, and Colt’s guns were regularly featured in these. “Scarcely a week passes,” reported one London paper, “without some dispute, when revolvers and bowie-knives are immediately produced and someone is killed.” Stories of shoot-outs were not only entertaining, they confirmed what many in Britain thought about Americans, which is that they lived under barely civilized conditions in bullet-peppered air. Colt’s revolver fit perfectly into this portrait.”
― Jim Rasenberger, Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America

“The broad thesis of this book is that we cannot make sense of the United States in the nineteenth century, or the twenty-first for that matter, without taking into account Colt and his revolver. Combined in the flesh of the one and the steel of the other were the forces that shaped what the country became: an industrial powerhouse rising in the east, a violent frontier expanding to the west. In no American object did these two forces of economic and demographic change converge as dynamically and completely as in Colt’s revolver.”
― Jim Rasenberger, Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America