Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Churchill, Robert H

Title To shake their guns in the tyrant's face : libertarian political violence and the origins of the militia movement / Robert H. Churchill
Published Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, ©2009

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xiii, 370 pages) : illustrations, map
Contents The precedent of 1774: the role of insurgent violence in the political theory of the founding -- The revolution as living memory: Fries' Rebellion and The Alien and Sedition Act crisis of 1798-1800 -- The libertarian memory of the revolution in the Antebellum Era -- The roots of modern patriotism: conscription, resistance, and the Sons of Liberty conspiracy of 1864 -- Cleansing the memory of the revolution: Americanism, the black legion, and the first Brown Scare -- The making of the second Brown Scare: liberal pluralism and the evolution of the white supremacist right -- The origins of the militia movement: violence and memory on the suburban-rural frontier -- An exploration of militia ideology: the Whig diagnosis of post-Cold War America -- Epilogue: the defense of liberty in the age of terror
Summary "After the bombings of Oklahoma City in 1995, most Americans were shocked to discover that tens of thousands of their fellow citizens had banded together in homegrown militias. Within the next few years, numerous studies and media reports appeared revealing the unseen world of the American militia movement, a loose alliance of groups with widely divergent views. Not surprisingly, it was the movement's most extreme voices that attracted the lion's share of attention. In reality the militia movement was neither as irrational nor as new as it was portrayed in the press, Robert Churchill writes. What bound the movement together was the shared belief that citizens have a right, even a duty, to take up arms against wanton exercise of unconstitutional power by the federal government. Many were motivated to join the movement by what they saw as a rise in state violence, illustrated by the government assaults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, and Waco, Texas in 1993. It was this perception and the determination to deter future state violence, Churchill argues, that played the greatest role in the growth of the American militia movement. Churchill uses three case studies to illustrate the origin of some of the core values of the modern militia movement: Fries' Rebellion in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century, the Sons of Liberty Conspiracy in Civil War-era Indiana and Illinois, and the Black Legion in Michigan and Ohio during the Depression. Building on extensive interviews with militia members, the author places the contemporary militia movement in the context of these earlier insurrectionary movements that, animated by a libertarian interpretation of the American Revolution, used force to resist the authority of the federal government"--Publisher's description
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-353) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Print version record
Subject Militia movements -- United States -- History
Radicalism -- United States -- History
Government, Resistance to -- United States -- History
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Political Process -- Political Advocacy.
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Civil Rights.
Government, Resistance to
Militia movements
Radicalism
Militarismus
United States
USA
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780472027460
0472027468
128275419X
9781282754195
9786612754197
6612754192