The Winchester ─ The Gun That Built an American Dynasty

Arguably the world’s most famous firearm, the Winchester repeating rifle was one of the first to fire continuously without needing to be reloaded after every round. Laura Trevelyan, a descendant of the Winchester family, offers an engrossing personal history of the colorful New England clan responsible for the creation and manufacture of the “Gun that Won the West.” Trevelyan chronicles the rise and fortunes of a great American arms dynasty, from Oliver Winchester’s involvement with the Volcanic Arms Company in 1855 through the turbulent decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She explores the evolution of an iconic, paradigm-changing weapon that has become part of the American culture; a longtime favorite of collectors and gun enthusiasts that has been celebrated in fiction, glorified in Hollywood, and which earned ringing endorsements from the likes of Annie Oakley, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and the Native American tribesmen who called it "the spirit gun."
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Laura Trevelyan is the New York correspondent for the BBC and the author of A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and Their World. She lives in New York, NY.