No Duty to Retreat

"Richard Maxwell Brown's brief study of 'violence and American values' is quite simply a tour de force of provocatie, well-conceived, and smoothly written historiography....rich with novel insights, new conceptualizations, and solid documentation." -Richard W. Etulain, in Reviews in American History. "Fascinating and provocative, No Duty to Retreat is an authoritative examination of violence not only on the American frontier and in American society at large, but in American jurisprudence as well." -Robert M. Utley, author of High Noon in Lincoln, Billy the Kid, and Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier. "[No Duty to Retreat] is a delightful book and a provocative one to contemplate....It belongs in the library of all westerners." - Gordon Morris Bakken, in Montana: The Magazine of Western History. In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok killed Dave Tutt in a Missouri public square in the West's first notable "walkdown." One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Bernard Goetz shot four threatening young men in a New York subway car. Apart from gunfire, what do the two events have in common? Goetz, writes Richard Maxwell Brown, was acquitted of wrongdoing in the spirit of a uniquely American view of self-defense, a view forged in frontier gunfights like Hickok's. When faced with a deadly threat, we have the right to stand our ground and fight. We have no duty to retreat. Richard Maxwell Brown is Beekman Professor Emeritus of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon and the nation's leading expert in the history of violence in American, western, and frontier history