S-USIH at AHA 2024

Each year the Society for US Intellectual History is proud to sponsor at least one session at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

For 2024, we sent a few of our best to San Francisco.

Andrew McKevitt organized a brilliant and timely roundtable, “Beyond the Second Amendment: Rethinking U.S. Gun History,” featuring remarks from chair Brian DeLay and esteemed commenters Cari Babitzke, Josh Aiken, and Jennifer Tucker.

“What would a history of guns in the United States look like beyond the Second Amendment?”

 That was the central question of the roundtable–one McKevitt posed to upend the way scholars have traditionally thought about the history of firearms. He tells us, “with good reason, gun histories have long been dominated by interrogations of that contentious constitutional right.” Together, Aiken, Babitzke, DeLay, McKevitt, and Tucker introduced imaginative ways of thinking about firearms history that reach beyond the traditional Second Amendment framework.

McKevitt writes: “Guns are conspicuous tools of violence… but they are also consumer goods, objects of desire or fear, products of science and technology, and sources of political and cultural identity and conflict.” Taking a note from recent scholarship in sociology and political science, the panelists considered the materiality of guns, “objects with their own histories embedded in social networks and global capitalism, not simply abstractions to which legal concepts can be applied.”

Striking a novel discussion about material history, the speakers situated the gun in America from the 18th century to present to explain how we became a nation with over 400 million of them. In doing so, commenters offered refreshing approaches to the intellectual history of the firearm, making good on McKevitt’s promise to move past legal understandings of the topic and offering new lenses rooted in economics, material culture, and geography.

The roundtable was productive, lively, and sparked more audience questions than the scholars at the front of the room could answer in 90 minutes.

Bravo to the members for piercing through conventional understandings of a pressing topic with original perspectives, and for showcasing the type of scholarship that so well represents our organization.

If you weren’t able to catch our venerable S-USIH colleagues at AHA 2024, here’s a little more about what they’re each working on:

Josh Aiken (Yale University)

Joshua Aiken is a J.D./Ph.D. student in History and African American Studies at Yale University. His research broadly focuses on the relationship between race, displacement, and state-sanctioned violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as configured by and through criminal legal and migration regimes. His work has focused both on race and gun laws in the longue durée of U.S. history—using the framework of self-defense as a way of thinking about black subjunctivization and subjugation—and U.S. imperial formations as they relate to extra-territorial migration policies since the 1980s, namely, American sponsorship of Mexico’s Plan Frontera Sur and other attempts to surveil and manage the movement of Central American refugees. Joshua is the former Policy Fellow at the Prison Policy Initiative and is also a poet.

Cari S. Babitzke (Boston University)

Cari Babitzke is Lecturer in History at Boston University, where she recently received a Ph.D. She specializes in twentieth-century U.S. history with a focus on firearms politics. Her research and teaching investigate the changing landscapes of U.S. media, protest politics, and political history. Her dissertation explored the development of the gun rights movement and the NRA’s role as a foundational element of the modern American Right. Babitzke’s work has been featured on the Washington Post’s “Made by History” as well as on C-SPAN.

Brian DeLay (University of California, Berkeley)

Brian DeLay is the Preston Hotchkis Chair in the History of the United States at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America and the author of the prize-winning War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (Yale University Press, 2008) and the editor of North American Borderlands (Routledge, 2012). Currently he is working on two book projects, both under contract with W.W. Norton: Aim at Empire: American Revolutions through the Barrel of a Gun, 1750-1825 and Means of Destruction: Guns, Freedom, and Domination in the Americas. He is also working with a team of scholars to produce the Project on Arms Trade History (PATH), a data project quantifying the global arms trade from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of World War I.

Andrew C. McKevitt (Louisiana Tech University)

Andrew McKevitt is the John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana, where he has taught since 2012. He received a Ph.D. from the Department of History at Temple University in 2009. He is the recipient of the Stuart L. Bernath Scholarly Article Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations as well as the ATLAS Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents. He is the author of Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (UNC Press, 2017) and Gun Country: Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (UNC Press, 2023).

Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University)

Jennifer Tucker is Associate Professor of History and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She is a historian who studies the interrelations of art and science, photography, and mass visual culture, with a specialization in nineteenth- to mid twentieth-century British, U.S., women’s and gender history, and trans-Pacific history. She is the author of Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and co-editor of A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press and Penguin Books, 2019). Her current projects include research on the history of firearms lethality and the culture of firearms safety.