Born in Blood investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The United States of America. People the world over consider violence in the United States as measurably different than that which troubles the rest of the globe, citing reasons including gun culture, the American West, Hollywood, the death penalty, economic inequality, rampant individualism, and more. This compelling examination of American violence explains a political culture of violence from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, illustrating how physical force, often centered on racial hierarchy, sustained the central tenets of American liberal government. It offers an important story of nationhood, told through the experiences and choices of civilians, Indians, politicians, soldiers, and the enslaved, providing historical context for understanding how violence has shaped the United States from its inception.

‘Violence is central to American statecraft. In this remarkable book, Scott Gac unpicks individual, group, and institutional expressions of power, refracted through race, gender, and class. It is a chilling account of how and why violence became a ‘national tradition’ in US history.’

Joanna Bourke - author of Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invades Our Lives

‘Scott Gac’s ambitious and passionate book traces the emergence of a particularly American idea of when, why, for whom and against whom the powerful, and particularly the government, ought to use violence. Gac proposes the growth of this violent tradition as a throughline with which to rethink our national narrative, particularly through 1877, but also beyond. He reveals continuities among the violence of enslavement and lynching, capitalist violence, military violence, and frontier violence, and in doing so dramatically changes the significance of people and events you thought you knew, from George Washington to Revolutionary soldiers, to Robert Smalls, to striking railroad workers.’

Elaine S. Frantz - author of Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction

‘Scott Gac's Born in Blood illuminates the endemic violence along the front edge of the catastrophe more commonly known as American Freedom.’

Walter Johnson - author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

‘(Gac) makes a powerful case that America’s self-proclaimed values of liberty, equality and justice rest on some shaky foundations.’

Andrew Lynch Source: Irish Independent

‘Recommended.’

M. A. Byron Source: CHOICE

‘… an ambitious, sweeping synthesis of American history, retold through the lens of violence … It will be of interest to any scholar interested in the cultural history of American violence and will doubtless prove a popular addition to any undergraduate history or American studies course engaged with American violence.’

John K. Bardes Source: The Journal of Civil War History

‘Violent armed struggle is so ubiquitous in American history, however, that it would seem difficult to pin down as a coherent phenomenon. Where and when should the historian begin, for starters? … Gac chooses the Boston Massacre as his embarkation point … Upon this infamous episode Gac builds an analysis of a broad, longstanding phenomenon…’

Jason Shaffer Source: Society for US Intellectual History