[BatGuano]

I remember that Carl Furillo was called the “Reading Rifle” because of his great arm. That fits into the provided history...Thanks

[rawcatslyentist]

Where were the mudslimes in this important story?

The teleprompter reader tole us dat de mudslimes played an impotent role in the founding of dis nation.

[WLR]

Washington’s order,

“and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.... But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.”

Leadership is what we lack today..

Our GIs never outfought
our Generals out thought at every turn.

W

[PhiloBedo]

I never knew. I wished they taught this in the schools.

[NonValueAdded]

69 caliber ping

[Liberty Ship]

Thanks for the article. My ggggrandfather was recruited by Morgan from Virginia and served as a rifleman through the end of the war.

[Gilbo_3]

But Murphy represented more than that. He was the quintessential American rifleman. He was reared believing that liberty and independence were his birthright and that his firearm was the instrument that guaranteed those God-given freedoms.

long but worth it...

[Brass Lamp]

The craftsmen who manufactured the rifle were the Pennsylvania Dutch — who are not Dutch but German. Dutch comes from Deutsch, meaning German. Historically in America, whenever anyone referred to the Dutchman down the road or the Dutch farmer across the creek, he meant German. The Germans had made the finest rifles in Europe, and the German immigrants to America, comprising about one-third of Pennsylvania's population, in turn produced the finest rifles in the colonies.

Actually, there is a complete and total absence of evidence to support this commonly made claim. To date, there are no studies into this subject (such as anthropologists conduct upon the matter of paleolithic spear point development) which conclude that the American long rifle is evolved from German practice. In fact, the whole body of evidence speaks loudly against the likelihood that the hunting arms of the colonial frontier were derived from Dutch/German forms. It is difficult to find two more nearly perfect polar opposite formal artifacts within the subject of tool-making than the short, fat "jaeger" and the long, slender "Kentucky" rifles. There exist no transitional forms which link the two, and where one might expect to find examples of such mean proportion there are only the common and prolific samples of preexisting French/British design which revisionists have yet to hijack.

Evidence aside, there are no reasoned arguments to logically support the claim of German ancestry beyond the rough train that, because some "Kentucky" rifles were made in Pennsylvania, and that because many German immigrants settled (at some time) in Pennsylvania, that this form of rifle was therefore of German derivation. This line of thought fails totally to accommodate the actual proliferation of the form beyond the geographic, or even temporal, domain of the influence. The weapon form in no way corresponds to the settlement pattern of Dutch/German immigration, and is found all along the colonial East over a period of time which excludes the likelihood (or even possibility) of such a causal influence. The American long arms tradition was already quite well developed and tending toward the "Kentucky" model well before there was any significant Germanic influence.

The worst of it is that the claim that the American long rifle is derived from a Germain tradition is also unsupported by any chain of scholarship such that anyone can locate any original attribution for the discovery of this knowledge. The train of citation never extends beyond the authority of some so-and-so who will finally pitch the ball back into the murky mist of "everyone else says so". The history of the claim does not extend back to the period itself and it seems to have only been within my own lifetime that people (almost never historians) have begun to assert this little 'factoid'.

Neither did contemporaries ever utter the words "Pennsylvania rifle" to express recognition of any discrete form. Kentucky was not on Pennsylvania's frontier. It was carved out of Virginia and, along with Tennessee and the Ohio, was almost wholly blazed by settlers from that state. Pennsylvania isn't even on the way. In fact, the exact histories of many surviving examples of the "Kentucky" rifle are known and often place their manufacture in either Virginia or Kentucky itself.

Americans already knew how to make rifles and those features which serve to distinguish them from the British norm serve to even further distance them from any suggestion of Germanic influence.

[Last Dakotan]

pinger

[WVNight]

I’d never heard this particular story until now. It will soon be repeated often. Thanks!!!

[SCalGal]

Bookmark for my 8th grade American History class.

[EdReform]

Bump & bookmark

[BulletBobCo]

Bump