Sources for advertising and marketing history at the McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West

Purpose This paper aims to describe written and visual data sources useful for researching the history of advertising and marketing that are held in the collections of the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. Design/methodology/approach Knowledge of the McCracken collections has been acquired over several years of online searches and subsequent data analyses, communications with Library staff and from a personal visit to Cody in September 2021. Findings Several digital collections are surveyed. The Roy Marcot Firearms Advertisement Collection visually documents industry practices and also speaks to larger issues in American gun culture. The Winchester Publications provide insights via company magazines into product and management strategies, hardware retailing and visual merchandising tactics during the 1920s. The Schuyler, Hartley and Graham archive of business correspondence illustrate business-to-business marketing from the nineteenth through the early 20th century. The Buffalo Bill Collection reveals how the culturally important Wild West shows were promoted and experienced. Originality/value This paper familiarizes advertising and marketing historians with the primary sources in the McCracken Research Library and suggests some potential areas for study.

Sexual Dysfunction and Gun Ownership in America: When Hard Data Meet a Limp Theory

Although there has been no direct empirical evidence linking sexual dysfunction (SD) with gun ownership, speculation has been widespread and persistent for decades. In this paper, we formally examine the association between SD and gun ownership. Our primary hypothesis, derived from the psychosexual theory of gun ownership, asserts that men experiencing SD are more likely to personally own guns than other men. To test this hypothesis, we used recently collected data from the 2021 Crime, Health, and Politics Survey (CHAPS), a national probability sample of 780 men, and binary logistic regression to model gun ownership as a function of SD. Our key finding is that men experiencing SD are no more likely to own guns than men without SD. This interpretation was supported across several indicators of SD (performance anxiety, erection trouble, and ED medication) and gun ownership (personal gun ownership, purchasing a gun during the pandemic, and keeping a gun in one’s bedroom). To our knowledge, we are the first to have directly tested the association between SD and gun ownership in America. Our findings are important because they contribute to our understanding of factors associated with gun ownership by challenging the belief that phallic symbolism and masculinity somehow drive men with SD to purchase guns. Our results also remind us of the perils of gun culture rhetoric, which, in this case, function to discredit gun owners and to further stigmatize men with ED. We conclude by calling for more evidence-based discussions of SD and guns in society.

Feminism and Firearms: Gun Ownership, Gun Carrying, and Women’s Empowerment

In this article, I use the 2018 Guns in American Life Survey (GALS) to investigate the relationship between feminist identity, gun ownership, gun carrying, and women’s empowerment. Notably, while identifying as a feminist lessens the likelihood that a woman will own a gun, of women who own handguns, feminists are more likely to carry their guns all or most of the time. Past victimization is associated with ownership and carrying, confirming genuine concern by women about their safety. Finally, findings reveal that women are more empowered by guns than are men and the relationship is moderated by age. Results are discussed in light of the current American gun culture focused on self-defense and a carry mindset that some women develop as feminist culture in action.

A Woman’s Place in Gun Advertisements: The American Rifleman, 1920-2019

In this chapter, we create a bridge between the existing research on gun culture and on the portrayal of women in advertisements by looking at gender advertisements in The American Rifleman magazine over a 100-year time period, from 1920 to 2019. Based on the existing literatures on American gun culture and gender in advertising, we expected to see a consistently stereotypical portrayal of women in gun advertising in The American Rifleman over the entire 100 year time period we examined. What we found was substantially more complex. In examining a woman’s place in gun advertising, we offer some first steps toward understanding a woman’s place in gun culture more broadly.

Edgar Huntly's Gun Violence and Indigenous Mechanisms of Peace

This essay analyzes American gun culture, past and present, through two lenses: a set of early Euro-American writings on weapons and defense, including Charles Brockden Brown's well-known novel Edgar Huntly, and a little-known but capacious archive of Native American materials, philosophy, and story. While the Euro-American writings and the Indigenous archive both raise crucial questions about the relation between weapons and human subjectivity, only the Indigenous archive presents vital alternative object orientations that promote peace. Considering wampum belts in particular as an Indigenous mechanism of peace, this essay argues that to understand American gun violence we must pay attention to Indigenous efforts to cultivate relationships by putting forth healing objects and burying the weapons of war, efforts that are largely erased from the colonial records and from the contemporary imagination of the past. Ultimately, Native American theorizations of object orientation and human subjectivity challenge both our understanding of the colonial past and our current conversation surrounding gun violence.

Warfare in Northern Mozambique, Late Sixteenth to Late Nineteenth Centuries

Studies of precolonial African warfare are still relatively scarce and northern Mozambique is no exception. This paper examines more than three centuries of African warfare among the Makua of Macuana. It emphasizes continuities in strategy and tactics, while at the same time paying attention to innovations in weaponry, above all the adoption and effective utilization of firearms. Based on a critical assessment of both primary and secondary sources, it analyzes Portuguese claims of cannibalism among the Makua in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the development of a “gun culture” from the late eighteenth century. It also seeks to locate Makua warfare in a broadly comparative African perspective.