Bryan Burrough
speaker
583 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 5d ago
Bryan Burrough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It's no accident this all started once the Civil War ended.
1865, like nineteen forty five, was a year that heralded big changes in the country.
The war had lasted five excruciating years, and while yes, it changed America, what's more accurate is to say it changed Americans, especially American men.
one in four men fought in the war, and the percentage is a lot higher when you count just men under forty.
Not having television or any recent war to give them context.
Most men rode off to battle, with little sense whatsoever of the horrors they would likely endure there.
Davis Tutt staggered forward, shouted, boys, I'm killed, and keeled over dead.
The first great gunfighter, John Wesley Harden, killed at least 26 men before he turned 21 years old.
It'd help you know that he was pretty much a complete psychopath.
Historians have only begun studying the impact it had on them in recent years, but it's assumed that PTSD and similar disorders were pretty bad, especially in an era where mental health challenges commonly went unrecognized and untreated.
So it's hardly a surprise to learn that the first years after the Civil War were a trying time for many veterans, newspapers across the country fairly exploding with tales of their violence, their drunkenness, and an inability to return to polite society, as it were.
While it's pretty speculative to suggest many gunfighters suffered from something like PTSD, I think it's safe to assume some must have.
Certainly many were veterans.
That guy Clay Allison, the naked toothbulling guy, he was drummed out of the Confederate Army for intense mood changes, we're told, most notable when he'd been drinking.
The doctor used the word mania to describe them.
Yeah, scary guy.
What's not speculative though is the tidal wave of handguns that washed over the country in these years.
Many were brought home by veterans, but many more, on the order of 1.3 million guns, in fact, were auctioned off by the federal government, which no longer needed them.
Wearing the sidearm, typically in a belt holster, sometimes tied tight to a man's thigh, hadn't been entirely unknown in America before then.
Travelers to the South, especially, had been remarking on open carry for years now, the point being how unusual it was everywhere else.
Showing 421–440 of 583 · page 22 of 30
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