Description: Cramer's work examines the motivations and legislative history behind the nation's first laws regulating the carrying of concealed deadly weapons and establishes a previously unexplored link between these laws and efforts to suppress dueling in the southern back-country. Cramer challenges the traditional attempt to explain these laws as efforts to maintain slavery and to restrict the rights of free blacks. He rejects such thinking by demonstrating that the concealed weapon laws of the early republic were not racially-motivated. He further supports the work of other scholars who have lately examined the role of Scots-Irish immigrants in creating a distinctive southern back-country culture of "honor violence" including dueling and brawling. It was the attempt to control such violence, Cramer argues, that led to the concealed weapons laws.

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