“Laura Trevelyan is one of the most brilliant journalists and incisive television presenters working in America today. She is also a very accomplished historian, and in this fascinating and vividly evocative book, she tells the story of her Winchester and Bennett forebears. From one perspective, this is an exemplary business history, of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, of the rifles and shotguns it produced and sold in vast quantities, and of the rise, triumph and fall of one of America's greatest arms manufacturers. From another, it is an enthralling account of a famous New England dynasty, full of larger than life characters, both men and women. Deeply researched and beautifully written, this is an outstanding study of an iconic American firm and of an extraordinary American family.”—Sir David Cannadine, Princeton University

“Who knew that the maker of the ‘gun that won the west,’ the Winchester ’73, was a New Englander who began his career manufacturing shirts? The extraordinary life of Oliver Winchester and his company – and its rapid rise and slow and tragic fall into modern obscurity – is told gallantly and with great precision by a distant descendent, the noted BBC correspondent Laura Trevelyan. From Little Bighorn to the Winchester Mystery House – it is all there, a series of American icons sturdily described by a writer who, because of her ancestry, knows the story far better than most and tells it better than all.” —Simon Winchester, author of Pacific: The Ocean of the Future