RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksOffering 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. Along the way, he gives us a picture of technological change and the rise of industry. His book’s most important contribution of all: showing how this history was rooted in horrific violence and oppression ... The hidden figures of the Colt legend—often passed over by other biographers and Colt himself but highlighted by Rasenberger—were the gunsmiths he hired ... Rasenberger successfully subverts the myth of lone inventor that so plagues biographies of this sort ... 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 ... Rasenberger’s Revolver leaves us in no such doubt: New England arms makers mass produced repeating firearms, and the US military and westward-traveling settlers used those weapons to put bullets in other humans, especially nonwhites ... Rasenberger’s Revolver helps us see something beyond the economic efficiency of these techniques: how Colt’s story and the story of his methods fit within the United States’s own imperial ambitions, enabling new levels of bloody violence, oppression, and even genocide.
