Key Pages:
13 Things 2008
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]
The Proposal! (Or: The Heist!)
The Tommy Gun pops up pretty often in early modern history, especially during the 1920's and 30's where it was associated closely with the mob and illegal activities. It also pops up in a very similar form in World War II, where the allies used it, not for trafficking beer, but instead as part of the cause to spread democracy. So, how exactly did the same gun become something entirely different in a matter of 20 years--socially, politically, and as an image when portrayed with a human?
I'm planning on going into the tommy gun in these contexts, looking at social histories and imagery involved with it, as well as a bit of the classic good-or-bad problem: does man shoot because of the gun in his hands, or the gun shoot because man wills it? Taking it even further, can the same gun be merely good or evil, or does it depend on who's wielding it, or when? Plus, I want to try and throw the gun into the equation of good and evil--after all, when we considering good and evil, we usually only consider it in terms of the humans that commit the act. Can you really take things out of the equation?
I want to read texts about the Tommy Gun, of course, but I want to split it fairly evenly between subjective and objective text, to emphasize and explore how the thing changes so much depending on context. I haven't found the exact books I'll be looking at, but I'm thinking a very factual text, and then two other texts involving the Tommy Gun in mob culture and in world war II. I'll also look at both imagery and social context by looking at important images of the Tommy Gun in both periods--think watching the Godfather or other mafia-based movies and looking at glorified imagery and propaganda of the war--from both the allies and the axis powers.
Finally, this may be thrown by the wayside if I find enough to talk about otherwise, but I'm also going to try to look for the Tommy Gun in lesser known areas--one instance that comes to mind is, in fact, the Tommy Gun's use in Serbia in the 1990's. I'd then see how they correlate to the progression between the 1920's and the 1940's.