George Washington insisted that his portrait be painted with one. Daniel Boone created a legend with one. Abraham Lincoln shot them on the White House lawn. And Teddy Roosevelt had his specially customized.

Now, in this first-of-its-kind book, historian Alexander Rose delivers a colorful, engrossing biography of an American icon: the rifle. Drawing on the words of soldiers, inventors, and presidents, based on extensive new research, and encompassing the Revolution to the present day, American Rifle is a balanced, wonderfully entertaining history of this most essential firearm and its place in American culture.

In the eighteenth century American soldiers discovered that they no longer had to fight in Europe’s time-honored way. With the evolution of the famed “Kentucky” Rifle—a weapon slow to load but devastatingly accurate in the hands of a master—a new era of warfare dawned, heralding the birth of the American individualist in battle.

In this spirited narrative, Alexander Rose reveals the hidden connections between the rifle’s development and our nation’s history. We witness the high-stakes international competition to produce the most potent gunpowder . . . how the mysterious arts of metallurgy, gunsmithing, and mass production played vital roles in the creation of American economic supremacy . . . and the ways in which bitter infighting between rival arms makers shaped diplomacy and influenced the most momentous decisions in American history. And we learn why advances in rifle technology and ammunition triggered revolutions in military tactics, how ballistics tests—frequently bizarre—were secretly conducted, and which firearms determined the course of entire wars.

From physics to geopolitics, from frontiersmen to the birth of the National Rifle Association, from the battles of the Revolution to the war in Iraq, American Rifle is a must read for history buffs, gun collectors, soldiers—and anyone who seeks to understand the dynamic relationship between the rifle and this nation’s history.

"In this solid history, Rose (Washington's Spies) explores the development of the rifle, such as how it evolved in American history to become an iconic symbol of freedom and how it developed as an effective military instrument as well as a private citizen's firearm. Drawing on numerous primary sources, from letters and journals of ordinary soldiers to the writings of inventors such as Samuel Colt, Rose traces the rise of the rifle from its original use as a hunting tool and a means of defense and protection to its eventual use as an offensive weapon in wars of conquest. Loaded with facts, the book reveals that firearms didn't come into their own in the colonies until 1609, when Samuel de Champlain led his men on a raid of the Mohawks. In their increasing contact with European adventurers and traders, Native Americans recognized the power of firearms and cannily traded for such weapons. By the early 18th century, gunsmiths of German extraction invented a rifle that had greater accuracy and distance than muskets. The Kentucky rifle, so named because it's rumored that Daniel Boone carried one of these early rifles in his travels around the frontier, was easier to load and could drop a bear, or a British soldier, in fewer shots and at a more distant range than a musket. In his entertaining history, Rose engagingly chronicles Americans' peculiar quest to build a more refined and effective firearm." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

The title of Alexander Rose's marvelous book says it all: Although "American Rifle" is ostensibly about the history of a piece of machinery, a tool, a killing instrument, it is only in America that the rifle has become an ineradicable part of the culture and can be written about as if it were a living person. "My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus I will learn it as a brother,"... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) runs an old hymn still memorized by both Army and Marine recruits. That hymn was intended to serve as an instructive and inspirational credo for young men joining the armed forces who, increasingly, no longer came from a rural or ranching background in which boys started shooting as small children with a BB rifle, got a .22 for their 10th birthday or sooner, and were taught how to shoot and look after a gun by their father, uncle or grandfather, in a rite of passage as old as the republic.

Let me confess that I myself received my first rifle (a Browning .22) when I was 10; that I went to school in Switzerland (home of William Tell and of an armed militia in which every Swiss adult male keeps his service rifle at home), where we were encouraged to shoot on the rifle range frequently; and that I am a life member of the NRA. However, this book can be read with pleasure regardless of one's position on gun control.

In the Old World, firearms were a class indicator: prerogatives of the military or, when intended for sporting purposes, of the landed aristocracy. In the 17th and 18th centuries, throughout Europe and Great Britain, poaching was a capital offense; the ordinary non-landowning man had no need, and no right, to keep a firearm at home, and hanging judges gleefully sentenced those of the starving rural poor who killed a pheasant or a deer. The biggest difference between America and Great Britain was not just the abundance of wildlife, but the all-important fact that in the Colonies it didn't belong to anybody; a good marksman could put meat on the family table every night without being hanged for the act. The firearm above the fireplace became a symbol of self-sufficiency, of freedom, of a potentially classless society (at any rate, one without a hereditary aristocracy), of sturdy independence and of self-defense.

Rose begins his story with the German invention of the rifled barrel in the 15th century and its introduction to the New World by German settlers and gunsmiths in the first years of the 18th century, where its merits over the smooth-bore musket were quickly appreciated. Within a few decades, the American rifle had taken on its unmistakable appearance — the very long barrel and the accurate, long-distance sights — as well as taking its place in myth and legend as the Kentucky rifle or the Daniel Boone rifle, and backwoods Americans were already cultivating standards of marksmanship undreamed of in the Old World. Indeed, when George Washington posed for a portrait by Charles Willson Peale circa 1789, his rifle appeared clearly in the painting, for ownership of a good rifle and the ability to shoot it accurately were already becoming popular attributes for aspiring politicians.

English aristocrats cherished their expensive, handmade shotguns, but in America the weapon that mattered was always the rifle. With a marksman's eye for detail and a gift for describing odd characters, Rose describes the way in which the rifle helped create and transform American industry. As the frontier moved farther west, the great and growing market for cheap rifles generated mass production: The first mass-produced artifact with interchangeable parts was, unsurprisingly, a rifle, produced by unskilled labor in Vermont. Rose tells the extraordinary story of how the American yearning for technological improvements led to the repeating rifle, first used in warfare in the Civil War, and eventually to the Winchester lever-action rifle, ultimate settler of arguments and killer of Indians and buffalo. He works in the complex and fascinating story of the U.S. Army's ceaseless pursuit of perfection in military rifles, sometimes resulting in triumphantly successful weapons like the World War II Garand, sometimes in costly failures like the M14 and the still controversial high-tech, small-caliber M16. Rose sensibly reaches the conclusion that "for some years to come the rifle of the future will be the rifle of the past," which pretty much sums up 250 years of military thinking on the subject.

Like David McCullough in "The Great Bridge," Rose has the rare ability to make technology come alive even for the non-technology-minded. He is not only a good historian but also a gifted storyteller, and I hope his book will make its way beyond the readership of American Rifleman and Shotgun News to everyone who wants to read about a singular and enduring artifact in American life and history.

Reviewed by Michael Korda, editor-in-chief emeritus of Simon & Schuster and author of 'Charmed Lives,' 'Queenie' and other books, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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“Marvelous…. Like David McCullough in The Great Bridge, Rose has the rare ability to make technology come alive even for the non-technology-minded. He is not only a good historian but also a gifted storyteller.”Michael Korda, Washington Post

“Fascinating…. The history of the U.S. is mirrored in the history of one of it technological achievements…. Loaded with detail, full of lively characters and an abundant spirit of invention.  The history of the rifle is also the history of mass production, of American politics, of the legal system, and of war itself.”Booklist

“Entertaining…. Loaded with facts…. Drawing on numerous primary sources, from letters and journals of ordinary soldiers to the writings of inventors such as Samuel Colt, Rose traces the rise of the rifle from its original use as a hunting tool and a means of defense and protection to its eventual use as an offensive weapon in wars of conquest.”Publishers Weekly

“Good reading for those on either side of the gun-control debate….A fascinating story replete with missed opportunities, skulduggery, entrenched dogma and internecine battles.”Sunday Oregonian

“Definitive … full of lost historical fact and intriguing anecdotes.”Sacramento Bee

"Irresistible history…American Rifle, a biography of a revolutionary idea, is ingeniously conceived, deftly written and thoroughly engrossing."—Dallas Morning News

Born in the United States, Alexander Rose was raised in Australia and Britain. A military historian and former journalist, he is the author of Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, and his writing has appeared in the New York Observer, the Washington Post, Studies in Intelligence, and many other publications.