communications for the help. they provide it to promote today's talk, and i also want to welcome c-span and book tv to write state's campus. we're thrilled that you're here and we hope to have the chance to see you again. finally. i want to acknowledge that we are located on the homelands of the sessian hopewell, edina, miami and shawnee peoples. we acknowledge the sufferings these indigenous tribes experience at the hands of settler colonialist, and we pay homage to the struggles as well as the hopes and dreams this land represents additionally, please let me know if you would like an accessibility copy of professor lockhart's talk and i'll make sure that you get one. professor paul douglas lockhart has been a member of the history faculty at wright state university since 1989. in addition to teaching popular classes on topics such as the history of the gun and history's kings and queens. paul has published seven books and military history and on the history of scandinavia. paul is also had fellowships from the american council of learning societies and the american scandinavian foundation. he has been a visiting lecturer at the university of southern denmark and he has been the national endowment for the humanities visiting distinguished professor at suny potsdam and 2014. paul was named a bravesh golding distinguished professor of research here at wright state and in 2020. he was named ohio distinguished historian by the ohio academy of history paul lives in centerville with mary his wife alex their teenage son one poodle and three according to paul dimwitted cats. paul's most recent book which will be hearing about today is firepower a magisterial history of how changes in weapons technologies have not only shaped forms of warfare, but also impacted almost every aspect of modern human society and especially the structure of power in the west from the renaissance to the dawn of the atomic era as one recent review. has put it paul's firepower is a fascinating rip roaring ride. written in paul's enviably elegant style and published by basic books firepower is primed to be a widely read and widely discussed title. here at wright state. we're lucky not only to get the chance to hear more about firepower while it's still hot off the presses but also to get to learn from paul every day of the year. so, please join me in welcoming professor paul lockhart to the podium. thank you for that crystal very generous introduction. a second here. there we have. firepower is the most difficult book i've ever written most challenging book i've ever written. now if you have to figure out already and know chris gave a brief introduction to it fire powers a survey history of a fairly large topic namely of the the history of weapons technology in what i like to call the age of the gun in other words from the introduction of of gunpowder weapons in the west and the late middle ages until roughly the end of the second world war a period in which not only are firearms the center of tactics and of the military art, but really all so the primary focus of military technology after the second world war is not as if firearms go away clearly, but they're not quite the same priority that they once had so it's compared to things like studying like writing about the foreign policy of denmark over a 40-year period it's a large topic for me. and and that's one of the reasons that was that was that was so challenging. it's a big book and since i'm as a reviewer told me a very early reviewer lockhart's book is really large. i mean, i like i like the pros it reads really well, but it's big. i think it would probably keep up six times in a review. it made me feel kind of self-conscious about the thing, but the theme itself is big obviously, it's also the first book i've written that wasn't about a person or a group of people and and that in itself was kind of was kind of weird for me. in fact, it's about things about things that hill or main people and after a while they got oddly kind of worrying. i mean i've done dealt with military history almost my entire adult life and certainly my entire professional life, and i'm used to writing about those things, but it still, you know took its toll after every now and then i i remember in fact reading a a german book written by written by military surgeon about the effect of high velocity small arms projectiles over adopted in the 1890s replete with lots of photographs and diagrams and i spent about an hour with the book and i just couldn't touch the topic for probably three or four days after that. it was at it was that draining and that you'll give us a high experience for me. not that historians are not used to dealing with unpleasant things. of course, they are i mean history history wouldn't be history if it weren't unpleasant much at the time. um, but but that was i a different experience. and also it's a book that evolved as i wrote it now anybody who's written a book or he's an article for that matter? knows that they don't start they don't end the way you expect them to right. i mean always go in a slightly different direction. sometimes this entirely unanticipated and with this book in particular because it although i've been writing it. it's roughly 2016-2017. i've been writing it in my head. probably for about the time. i was 18 or 19. in fact, it was kind of an odd moment. i was going through some stuff. i retrieved for my parents house a few years ago, and it was a blackboard that used to be in my bedroom when i was a kid with notes for some reason. my parents had kept on i thought i wrote in 1983 about about the parabolic trajectory of rifle musket projectiles and what this means about civil war tactics. well, that was that was really odd and that was a really odd 19 year old too for that matter. so i've been kind of working this out in my head for a long time. just never actually putting it to paper until the past few years and and during that time the book went in different directions. i've been asking fact. i've done a couple of podcasts so far about the book and one of the questions that comes up is it was a research process like you're in a story and you probably spent a lot of time in archives a little well. yeah, but not for this. um because it is a big book and it's based primarily on secondary sources. there's that's an issue, but you over the past. no, yeah, roughly over the past 30 years as i worked in other archives. every now that i find a little tidbit and the national archives in copenhagen, for example, i find a little tidbit or two and i put them away for later use and so the book was had kind of a weird journey in coming together. and it definitely did not end up exactly the way i expected to and i think i learned more oddly from the process of this book then that i very often do when i'm when i'm writing anything. my purpose in writing this book. was really twofold first of all. it's been stuck up here for a long time. i had to get rid of it, and i'm really relieved now that i have i'm hoping that i can i can think about other things for a while and and second because well there is a lakota or several laguna where it comes to the the academic study of weaponry academics. generally don't write a great deal about firearms and i'll get back to that in a few moments but i wanted to say something about why i decided to do this. first of all kind of a disclaimer. i am a gun owner for since i was 18. i've been collecting antique guns, although i must confess within a past decade of divested myself a bunch of that collection. collecting weapons. it turns out takes a fair amount of work, and i'm lazy. they also take a lot of room and people visit your house and see a whole bunch of guns. they automatically questions come up right so, but i don't come from a gun family. my father brought home a couple of japanese arasaka rifles from the second world war and most of those were thrown up on my grandfather who hated guns and my parents were never we're neither warm or cold. on guns. i wasn't allowed to buy a musket until i was 18 and then only because it was a musket --, you know, no modern weapons, but my connection comes, you know, kind of oddly and i'm glad to finally i can i can make an homage to her my paternal grandmother my dad's mom. um my my grandma lockhart, i was very close with she broke her when i was eight. and so for most of my childhood i helped take care of her. and grandma lockhart just seemed a historic. she first of all probably the only person i knew in my peer group growing up who had grandparents born in the 19th century. and that was that was her. she in spending time with her she demanded some really unusual things with me like memorizing a whole bunch of long fellow poems until about 15 years ago. like it's still recite rick of the hesperus. i can't anymore probably just as well make room for other more important things because she came from whaling stock and yearn for the sea. she made me memorize a whole bunch of different shipwrecks. and so as a 10 year old, i could tell a brig from a brigantine from a snow and a bark from a barkantine from a topsailor from a shipwreck. it did really hasn't really done me that much good over the years, but i do remember those things. she was my window to history. and in that time that i spent with her. i mean, i'm sure her many of her stories were heavily embellished. but she remembered seeing american troops coming home for the spanish-american war. he remembered seeing taft on a campaign stop in 1912. she remembered and this was kind of my introduction to the the horrors of the industrial revolution if you remembered a friend of hers getting crushed by a load of scrap metal that had been dumped of a second story window in the aimed sword shop in chicopee in massachusetts. she herself was a middle girl growing up in central, massachusetts first in a textile mills there until she started working at springfield armory invent her life revolved around guns. after springfield, she went to remington arms in their factory in bridgeport, connecticut where she was an inspector and she talked about this a lot as i think probably about the age of 10. she had taught me verbally. how to strip and reassemble a russian mosinagant rifle which i thought was really odd until i realized that what is really on no matter how you slice it that that remington manufactured mozena got rifles for the zaras government and beginning of world war one if you do them intimately used to tell me in fact that she assumed russians were really horrible people because the bayonet was really gruesome. she had the test-fired browning water cool machine guns and to be that you know meteor about the coolest grandmother in the world. it's actually smuggled one home. is by peace my grandfather wouldn't say separated my grandfather. threw the ball out. thanks, grandpa. hey, that's probably worth about fifty thousand dollars right now. the she all these things she imparted to me and and part of it was that it was a connection i had with her part of it was firearms became to me kind of a tangible. a connection to a kind of history that's fascinated me which was the only the history of war. but i digress here. i wrote firepower to fill the kunas i'd said and it's not that historians don't write about weapons they do. sometimes quite frequently in fact recently. there's been a greater degree of interest and he academic study of weapons. which kind of faded away after the first world war. there's a new journal called vulcan for example an academic journal devoted to the history military technology. there is a whole flew of books by academics dealing with culture and cultural and political implications of weapons technology preasantia. for example empire of guns a book about the involvement of the british small arms industry in early british imperialism in india, david silverman thundersticks a book about the the implications of the european small arms trade with indigenous american peoples and how that affected indigenous society really up to the end of the 19th century. but they're really kind of exceptions and in general historians. who want to read about weapons? or for whom weaponry is part of their work are really kind of poorly served. they really have a limited number of options for this. although there are some very broad studies of gun of firearms and weapons technology generally speaking. they have to rely on a couple of kinds of literature that well art conventional. i think for for academically trained historians namely coffee table books. in collector's books um, i was in the all position of once of counseling a really talented which automite student but a really talented history honor student who is doing in fact a an honors thesis that revolved around german use of captured soviet armor in a second world war. and having to tell her that you're the with all these scholarship that's been done on the eastern front in the second world war and the number of really excellent books on the great patriotic war. none of the really would tell her what she needed to know. about the the actual physical capabilities of the tanks that you needed to know about and that she actually be better served by going to the bargain shells at barnes & noble and finding a great tanks of world war ii types of books which had the information that she needed and that's again a symptom. of the fact that historians just generally. our house to put a historians don't do guns. by and large collectors literature which i used heavily for this. of course. i have a fair collection of collectors literature. um is mostly aimed at yes, it collectors and they're and they're intended mostly to help people identify weapons. i've got probably four or five four or five or six maybe six volumes actually dealing with american military flintlocks. from 1795 to 1842 and almost all of them deal with markings or the finials on the end of a prison spring. it said a really small details so that collectors can figure out exactly what it is that they have but that's the sometimes those are extraordinarily useful books, but again for detailed weapons information. it's very often. you have to very often you have to focus on on buff literature and collectors literature. so that's not terribly satisfactory. i think for the vast majority of historians who may need to deal with, you know with weapons and passing but who aren't necessarily interested in the same thing that collectors are it's hard to say why historians i think stay away from the history weapons and part of it. of course is i think and kind of natural. mostly repugnance there might be a little bit too strong. on natural dividends about weapons, especially in the united states, especially with the very complicated relationship that americans have with firearms or americans have with each other over firearms. which which does make dealing with weapons or you know for the point of view of the teaching professor dealing with for example with with students who are might have a different viewpoint than you do about weapons kind of unusual. it doesn't help too that i've encountered this a lot when dealing with other faculty over the past. 32 years that have been teaching is that for those of us who teach courses that involve war even if it's only parenthetically? we've always got that student. who shows up and wants to talk about something? really minor something that seems like ephemera in a world war ii class somebody wants to debate. whether you know whether the later later forms of sherman tanks are better than panthers for example, and why and and usually they have their fingertips all sorts of statistics and and it can seem it can seem irrelevant. you know that they're not they're not they're not catching on to the big points. you're trying to make i've i remember in fact a former colleague who was bothered by the fact that as she was talking about the origin to the first world war. i specifically the russo-japanese war. had a student who just couldn't get past talking about the size of the guns on russian and japanese ships it'sushiva straight and to her it seemed like you know the essentially the hobbyism of a wargamer. and not a not a serious attempt at doing history. granted you could make the argument. that there are very serious implications there. it's the in fact what is found out at sushima straight without getting in too much detail about the about the relative performance of different sized guns. that fuels perhaps one of the most dramatic unveilings of a weapon system ever named with the launching of the hms dreadnought in 1906, which reinvigorates the german the anglo-german naval naval arms race after that point. but in short those kinds of details certainly from a viewpoint of a teaching historian um can be be can be irritating? but there is this a certain danger to ignoring those details and the things that i wanted to. emphasize today because there's no way that i'm going to try to summarize or give you a 30 minute written synopsis of a 640 page book. yeah, i would not subject you to that and that's object myself to that, but that some of the important things that we can glean from a closer attention to the history of weapons technology. first of all there's there's a number of established narratives. that we talk about in history all the time that center around weapons. and because we've gotten some of the details of the weapons wrong, and i might seem like really tiny details. um, we end up getting the narrative wrong. a couple of examples several spring of mine, but two in particular um, and i think if for those of you and your and your audience who have taught a history or have been a student in a history class. you may well may will recognize this for american it's the civil war. um part of the narrative of the civil war and we see this not just in not just an established textbook say like jim mcpherson's a book on a survey history the civil war. that battle cry freedom of member correctly that the the war is uniquely bloody when you get this in american historianography all the time. it's also in high school and middle school curricula. it's in documentaries. it's just kind of assumed the civil war is uniquely bloody. why is he how is it uniquely bloody? well, there's more americans killed in the american civil war that it all american combats combined up to that point. well, then itself is kind of a questionable statistic because when we count casualties in the civil war we see both sides as americans can't do that with 1812 again do that with a mexican-american war you get obviously someone skewed statistics. it also takes into account doesn't take into account the much larger number of people fight in the american civil war on either side. um that the first of all the wars preceding the american civil war in american history european standards are puny. i mean war of 1812 compared to what's going on in europe at the same time. it's it looks it pretty pretty ridiculously small. and then finally that those statistics are absolute numbers. they're not proportional. in other words american civil war battles tend to involve proportionately about the same percentage of casualties. that we see in european wars of the same time. are we see in european wars at the 18th century? when as military historians used to tell us all the time wars were practically harmless? um, and at least at to being bloodless. but what nonetheless this is an established part of the narrative we talk about with the american civil war. so why? is the american civil war so bloody besides the fact that as a student of mine put it? more americans die in american civil war because war americans fight in the civil war. i mean pretty much explains it all the the narrative that it's a technology, right? it shall be foot put it in the ken burns documenta