Revolver

Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America

De: Jim Rasenberger

Narrado por: Jacques Roy

A “gripping” (Booklist), “clear-eyed, and honest” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of Samuel Colt - the inventor of the legendary Colt revolver (a.k.a. six-shooter), which changed the US forever, triggering the industrial revolution and the settlement of the American West.

Patented in 1836, the Colt pistol with its revolving cylinder was the first practical firearm that could shoot more than one bullet without reloading. For many reasons, Colt’s gun had a profound effect on American history. Its most immediate impact was on the expansionism of the American West, where White emigrants and US soldiers came to depend on it and where Native Americans came to dread it. The six-shooter became the iconic weapon of gunslingers, outlaws, and cowboys - some willing to pay $500 out West for a gun that sold for $25 back East.

In making the revolver, Colt also changed American manufacturing - his factory revolutionized industry in the United States. Ultimately, Colt and his gunmaking brought together the two most significant forces of change before the Civil War - the industrial revolution in the East, Manifest Destiny in the West.

“Written with a journalist’s sense of color and a historian’s eye for the revealing detail” (The Wall Street Journal), Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his 47 years, he seemingly lived five lives: He traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplied the Union Army with the guns they needed to win the Civil War. Colt lived during an age of promise and progress, but also of slavery, corruption, and unbridled greed, and he not only helped to create this America, he completely embodied it. By the time he died in 1862 in Hartford, Connecticut, he was one of the most famous men in the nation and one of the richest.

“Offering a panoramic view of American culture during Colt’s life” (LA Review of Books) Revolver is a “rollicking and informative account [that] will delight American history buffs” (Publishers Weekly).

©2020 Jim Rasenberger (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio

the Colt weapons which brought many too massacre

I now realized Sam Colt a Confederate sympathizer, a traitor of fact, and a devious business man

How a revolver changed the world.

Anyone interested in 19th Century US history will love this book. Rasenberger weaves the story of how Colt’s revolver revolutionized manufacturing with the ease and skill of William Manchester and David McCullough. An immensely informative and enjoyable read.

Solid Scholarship; Poor Perspective

The narrator does a great job, so no complaints there.
I do not doubt this author's skills as a scholar and researcher. He is also a good writer. However, I learned early on I was not going to care for his perspective. This is of course subjective, but it is noteworthy. He is pro Nicholas Biddle, in favor of the Second Bank of the United States, pro John Quincy Adams, anti-Andrew Jackson, pro Indian, anti-American settler, and thus naturally anti-entrepreneur. He is quick to make assertions and assumptions about Colt, and give unwarranted and unwanted commentary when it wasn't needed. It is baffling to me that someone could be a historian and dedicate so much of his life to studying a firearms manufacturer, only to hold him in contempt, as well as gun ownership as a whole. He ends the books with an inane diatribe about automatic weapons, and Sandy Hook. Pass.

If you are a leftist; go nuts. Maybe this is the book for you (although I doubt many leftists read history books.) If you are pro 2A, maybe find a different author about this subject. I won't say it's bad. There were interesting and well written parts for sure. The author was just not for me overall.

Outstanding history of Colt, his gun, & the time

This book is well researched and scholarly, but still readable and entertaining. The author gives you an easy to follow chronology, filling it with well known and little known facts about Colt's life, his family and the development of his gun. Where sources are conflicting, he presents the known facts but lets the reader draw his/her own conclusions. Finally, in today's environment with strong sentiments about firearms, he deftly lays out the story without passing judgement.
A great read with a first rate narrator.

Fascinating, and so well done.

I think this book is exceedingly good and well narrated. I found the book compelling. It is long, but I never lost interest. While it is essentially a biography of Sam Colt and his revolver, it also provides rich historical insight into life in America in the early 19th century. I applaud the author, the narrator, and others involved in creating this masterpiece.

Would be better with out the virtue signaling

I enjoyed the book alright, but the author makes a point to morally wag his finger at the past. Looking at the past with today’s morals is a fools errand and I would rather hear the whole story than looking at it from today’s perspective. There are better books about this subject.

History with a lot of personal opinion which which the author tried to stretch fact & evidence to match

Performance was good but the story would have been better if the author could have stuck to history & facts instead of trying to stretch them to match his own opinions. The author is obviously against guns very existence & he tried to bend everything he could to support that belief. It would have been nice if he would have just told the story & let the reader decide the morality of Sam Colt & the entire time period in American instead of twisting things to support his own opinions & therefore making the person listening to it question the real value of what the book provides. Questions such as if I know he is trying to bend this to support his opinion did he then leave things out that would not? In the end I listened to it wanting a history book on my favorite time in American history & got some of that & the politics of the author that were unhelpful & unwanted. I wish I could get my money & time back on this book which saddens me

Sam Colt, but not the Revolver

All about Sam Colt, who patented the first mass-produced a rapid-fire pistol. But not about the arm itself or its characteristics, or about its subsequent history. Colt arguably, along with Eli Whitney, invented the 'American System' or assembly-line method of manufacture.

Very little about the gun itself.

great history

did not realize the amount of history the Colt family has and the struggles they endured. excellent read!

If you don’t like guns, promoters, entrepreneurs, manifest destiny, and capitalism, why write a book about Sam Colt ?

Great detail on Sam’s life and the Colt family, much of it from letters saved by Colt and his family and associates and later archived, much of which was new to me.
And great detail on how the man promoted his revolutionary invention through many false starts and failures until final success.
Very little however on the patented mechanics of the revolver itself, or how firearms even work for that matter, or on Colt’s ground breaking mass production systems that predate Ford by half a century.
And everything through a 21rst century armchair quarterback fog that gets thicker as the book goes on.
In particular the simplistic and federalist biased narrative on the something as constitutionally complex as the Civil War, the dismissal of Confederate Irregular Cavalry as war criminals, and the repeated attempts at showing Colt’s revolver as somehow causal of everything from the Indian wars to modern street thuggery becomes tiring.
There’s a lot of interesting history here, but you’ve got to have the patience to enjoy it despite the increasing blare of that noisy virtue signal.