As a nation, it was brought into being by violence as much as by statecraft, suppressed an entire people through slavery, re-earned its nationhood through a terrible civil war, then celebrated that unification through the systematic, genocidal decimation of its Native American peoples. And it hasn't stopped there. And now, the encyclopedia format has allowed USC English professor Ronald Gottesman and consulting editor Richard Maxwell Brown to organize the efforts of nearly 500 academics and other experts to tackle the infinitely complex issue of violence in the United States. It was a bourgeois American, after all, Richard Jordan Gatling, who in the mid-19th century perfected the art of killing with a gun by industrializing its manufacture, just as Henry Ford would later industrialize the manufacture of automobiles. Thanks to the Gatling gun and its successor, the machine gun, millions of humans have met untimely ends with increased efficiency.
Violence pervades our leisure time as well.
Witness the growing popularity of extreme sports, in which a violent outcome remains a constant possibility. And as far as more traditional sports are concerned, the entry on boxing, while tracing its origins to Greco-Roman times, convincingly argues that boxing has been most notably represented in modern times in the United States. Government violence against citizens has a pertinent and lengthy category of its own. Related entries include Reconstruction and Waco. The civil disobedience entry encourages us to consider just how much resistance to authority, including violent resistance, is part of our national heritage.