Caroline E. Light is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (2014) and Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (2017).
Caroline E. Light
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Writing on Public Books
Guns Were for White Men
This image from the 1773 edition of Mary White Rowlandson’s narrative of her 1675 captivity by Native people presents us with a puzzle, one historian Jill Lepore queried in her influential history of King Philip’s War1: the woodcut image features a white woman armed with a rifle, defending her home from four hatchet-wielding men. Yet […]
Gun Studies Syllabus
In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control activists. In response, Public Books reached out to scholars Caroline Light and Lindsay Livingston to develop a Gun Studies Syllabus. There are an estimated 310 million […]
13 Key Works for Understanding Guns in the USA
If you are interested in understanding the past, present, and future of guns in …
