Welcome to our inaugural group of USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars! In partnership with the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI, we are proud to host such a fantastic array of scholars studying diverse aspects of the field. Please join us in welcoming our USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars: Cari S. Babitzke, Matthew Guariglia, Zachary Jacobson, Drew Maciag, L. Benjamin Rolsky, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, and Rick Townsend. We’ll be introducing you to a new Community Scholar daily, so please stay tuned right here for their research finds and updates.
Cari S. Babitzke specializes in 20th century U.S. history with a focus on firearms politics. She has spent a little over a decade researching and teaching about the changing landscapes of US media, protest politics, and political history. Her work explores the development of the gun rights movement and the National Rifle Association’s role as a foundational element of the modern American Right. Her writing has been featured in the Washington Post’s “Made by History” blog and she has appeared on C-SPAN and as a guest on the “This Day in Esoteric Political History” podcast. Read on to learn more about Cari’s scholarship and her plans as a USIH-IUPUI Community Scholar:
“Firearms advocates form one of the most powerful, highly committed, and mobilized forces in modern US politics, as well as a distinctive feature of American conservatism. Seeing themselves as the descendants of patriotic Minutemen and courageous Frontiersmen, contemporary American riflemen practice a now widely recognized identity politics on the Right. But that was not always so. My dissertation uncovered the making of a coherent rightwing political identity centered on gun ownership – built out of an idealized version of centuries of American history, nurtured and promoted by the premier organization for shooting sportsmen and firearms owners, the National Rifle Association, and appropriated most effectively by partisans in the Republican Party. In short, my dissertation project outlined the construction of an increasingly important voting bloc and followed along as the NRA and GOP tried to maximize the efficacy of firearms owners in the voting booth, used their activism as a pressure tactic on Congress, and built relationships with the White House.
Along the way, firearms advocates fostered and cemented the push toward ideological purity on the Right in ways historians have yet to fully recognize. In place of potential compromise on the twenty-first century’s most tragic example of American exceptionalism – wave after wave of gun violence – partisan commitment to seemingly-unfettered firearms access has become a litmus test, at times mind-boggling, for politicians across the nation. It is now time to turn that dissertation into my first monograph, and I am thrilled to have the resources and access provided by the USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars Program to help me do so.”
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