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
Before cotton took hold, livestock was the biggest Southern business.
Throughout history, as we'll see, livestock-based societies have tended to be off the charts violent, mostly to dissuade and punish livestock thieves.
All of which makes sense, a little at least.
But I think, ultimately, the Southern tendency toward violence was based in large part on its embrace of a pervasive male honor system.
This was something that arose slowly over the years, but certainly by the early 1800s, honor permeated every aspect of Southern society.
You can read entire books analyzing this stuff.
But in general, the Southern honor coach required a man to be brave, courteous, honest, and most important for our purposes, prepared to use violence, even deadly violence, to defend any challenge to his honor.
There's lots of theories why this came about too, but I think the best one is probably the simplest.
It revolved around slavery.
With enslaved black people doing almost all the Southern planners' actual work, you got something new in America, entirely new.
An entire class of the idle rich who looked around for role models and found them in the old European aristocracy.
For them, as for European royalty, honor became sacred.
Quite simply, it was how aristocrats and southerners kept score.
and the way any wannabe aristocrats tried to advance in society.
You can think of Southern honor as a kind of currency almost.
Without much of a banking system, it was all many planners had in terms of collateral when they needed a loan.
The South embraced honor in almost every aspect of society.
For one thing, before the Civil War, a lot of the South was still a frontier society.
And without anything like functioning law enforcement, all you had was the honor code.
People paid more attention to insults and honor, in other words, than laws written down on faraway books.
Showing 121–140 of 583 · page 7 of 30
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