The Six-Shooter State

American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence - vigilantes, private detectives, mercenary gunfighters - emerged in concert with the creation of new public and state forms of violence such as police departments or the National Guard. This dual public and private face of American violence resulted from the upending of a tradition of republican governance, in which public security had been indistinguishable from private effort, by the nineteenth-century social transformations of the Civil War and the Market Revolution.

• Presents an integrated and cohesive account of American violence over time, while focused on particular moments or cases, and should appeal both to historians interested in developmental change and social scientists interested in the testing of particular mechanisms in case study form
• Uses a variety of new analytic techniques but in an uncomplicated and straightforward way, built around narrative case studies, which allows general readers interested in the question of violence in American politics to appreciate some of the fundamental scholarly debates about the state
• Provides an institutional account for America's 'violent exceptionalism' and advances the debate past study of law and culture by showing how key features of America's institutional past have made private and public violence seem compatible