Bryan Burrough
speaker
583 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 3d 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
Long story short, they often did it with violence, with extrajudicial violence, that is, violence outside the legal system, which could include all sorts of things, right?
Vigilante justice, men in hoods, lynchings, you know what I'm talking about.
And increasingly after the Civil War, that meant using guns.
Dispute resolution with guns.
This got me thinking, and that's where I stumbled on to the obvious answer.
If you can't find gunfighters before eighteen sixty five, before the gunfighter era, could you at least find gunfighting?
And the answer was, of course you can.
It was called dueling, something that American men had been using to settle disputes for generations by that point.
This kind of thing is totally new to you.
A duel was basically a gunfight by appointment.
two men with pistols meeting up, typically in a field somewhere, just as Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had, commonly facing away from each other, taking a few steps, until one of their friends yelled something like Fire at which point they wheeled around and shot at one another.
He was all very civil.
I mean, until someone fell over dead.
A duel could be held to settle almost any kind of disagreement, but was commonly associated with matters of honor, you know, like where one gentleman insulted another gentleman's wife, or his hairstyle, or his politics.
Back before the eighteen hundreds, in those years before formal law enforcement had spread throughout Western countries, dueling had been terribly popular in Europe, especially amid the upper classes, the aristocracy, including in the two countries that sent so many people to American shores, England and Ireland.
British and Irish immigrants brought the practice across the Atlantic.
Dueling, in fact, took root in America from its very beginnings.
The year after the pilgrims first landed, there's a report of a duel in Massachusetts, with swords, but still
Formal duels, though, were rare until the Revolutionary War, when historians tell us a sort of fad around dueling popped up.
During the war, America was crawling with British and French officers who could get pretty touchy around questions of honor, and the rift between American Tories and American Patriots had a way of playing out day to day as interpersonal squabbles about loyalty and a man's honor.
Showing 61–80 of 583 · page 4 of 30
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