No Duty to Retreat : Violence and Values in American History and Society - Richard Maxwell Brown

No Duty to Retreat

Violence and Values in American History and Society

By: Richard Maxwell Brown

Hardcover | 23 January 1992

At a Glance

Hardcover


$96.27

or 4 interest-free payments of $24.07 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 7 to 10 business days

In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok killed Dave Tutt in a Missouri public square in the West's first notable "walkdown." One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Bernhard Goetz shot four threatening young men in a New York subway car. Apart from gunfire, what could the two events possibly have in common? Goetz, writes Richard Maxwell Brown, was acquitted of wrongdoing in the spirit of a uniquely American view of self-defense, a view forged in frontier gunfights like Hickok's. When faced with a deadly threat, we have the right to stand our ground and fight. We have no duty to retreat.
No Duty to Retreat offers an engrossing account of how this idea of self-defense emerged, focusing in particular on the gunfights of the frontier and their impact on our legal traditions. The right to stand one's ground, Brown tells us, appeared relatively recently. Under English common law, the threatened party had a legal duty to retreat "to the wall" before fighting back. But from the nineteenth century on, such authorities as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rejected this doctrine as unsuited to both the American mind and the age of firearms. Brown sketches the influence of frontier violence, demonstrating the tremendous impact of the famous gunmen and the prevalence of what he calls "grassroots gunfighters"--unsung men who resorted to their guns at a moment's notice. These duels, ambushes, and firefights, he writes, were more than personal vendettas: They were part of a "Western Civil War of Incorporation," pitting gunmen--usually Republicans and Unionists, who sided with
the expanding banks, railroads, and businesses--against cowboys and independent farmers, who were often Democrats sympathizing with the Confederacy. Brown examines the gunfight near the O.K. Corral in this light, showing how it was a climax of tensions between Tombstone's Republican businessmen (represented by Wyatt Earp) and the county's cowboys (led by the Clantons and McLaurys). He also looks at such lesser-known battles as the Mussel Slough war, in which resisting farmers, imbued with the no-retreat ethic, fought for their independent lifestyle against encroaching rail barons. This Civil War of Incorporation fed the violence of the West and reinforced the legal doctrine of "no duty to retreat."
The frontier days are long past, but Brown shows how the ethic of no retreat continues to shape everything from our entertainment to our foreign policy (including President Bush's "line drawn in the sand") to our politics to cases like that of Bernhard Goetz. Though challenged as never before by the values of peace and social activism, it remains a central theme in American thought and character.
Industry Reviews
"Richard Maxwell Brown has been a leading scholar of American violence since the late 1960s, when the turmoil following the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy led a presidential commission to publish Brown's interpretation in Violence in America. Now, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, Brown looks at line-drawing in the sand by the Reagan-Bush administrations, and also at contemporary urban shoot-outs in racial and drug-related warfare, and traces their roots in the western gunfight and frontier vigilantism."--Hugh Davis Graham, Holland N. McTyeire Professor of American History, Vanderbilt University "A fascinating and provocative book. Not only is it an authoritative and engrossing examination of violence on the American frontier and in American society at large, but in American jurisprudence as well. Brown, moreover, relates his history to the present, giving illuminating depth and continuity to one of the nation's most persistently severe problems. It will stimulate and inform scholar and layman alike."--Robert M. Utley, author of High Noon in Lincoln and Billy the Kid

More in History

War - Bob Woodward

Hardcover

RRP $55.00

$39.90

27%
OFF
Rubik's Cube : 50 Years of the World's Most Famous Cube - Official Rubik's
The Siege : The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama - Ben Macintyre
The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed the World - William Dalrymple
Dark Emu : Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture - Bruce Pascoe
Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor E Frankl

RRP $16.99

$16.95

Australia in 100 Words - Amanda Laugesen

RRP $32.99

$31.35

Junior Atlas of Indigenous Australia - Macquarie Dictionary

RRP $39.99

$27.80

30%
OFF
Sapiens : A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

RRP $27.99

$26.50

The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Paperback

RRP $36.99

$33.25

10%
OFF
Cactus Pear For My Beloved : A Family Story from Gaza - Samah Sabawi
Templars : The Knights Who Made Britain - Steve Tibble

RRP $24.95

$23.75

Faster Than A Cannonball : 1995 and All That - Dylan Jones
Raiders, Rulers, and Traders : The Horse and the Rise of Empires - David Chaffetz
Remembering Che : My Life with Che Guevara - Aleida March
Meditations : The Annotated Edition - Marcus Aurelius

RRP $49.99

$38.75

22%
OFF