About this item
"[A] valuable account ... The Wrong Hands brilliantly guides us through [the] challenges to American democracy." -Howard P. Segal, Times Higher Education Gun ownership rights are treated as sacred in America, but what happens when dissenters moved beyond firearm possession into the realm of high explosives? How should the state react? Ann Larabee's The Wrong Hands, a remarkable history of do-it-yourself weapons manuals from the late nineteenth century to the recent Boston Marathon bombing, traces how efforts to ferret out radicals willing to employ ever-more violent methods fueled the growth of the American security state. But over time, the government's increasingly forceful targeting of violent books and ideas-not the weapons themselves-threatened to undermine another core American right: free expression.
About the Author
Ann Larabee is Professor of English and American Studies at Michigan State University. Throughout her career, she has been concerned with cultural and political responses to disaster and terrorism, with a special interest in dangerous technologies. With intellectual historian Arthur Versluis, she founded the Journal for the Study of Radicalism, which engages in serious, scholarly exploration of radical social movements. Recently, she has been writing on the history of terrorism and its challenges to American democracy. On a lighter note, she currently edits The Journal of Popular Culture, where she writes regularly on movies, television, celebrity, and popular fiction.
