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
That's how people enforce justice.
And absent any real law enforcement, it's what led to the Southern penchant for extrajudicial violence, also known as vigilante justice.
also known as people taking the laws into their own hands.
Historians traced the first vigilantes to South Carolina in the 1790s, in fact.
Vigilanteism is important here because if you think about it, it's the foundation of all gunfighting.
People taking the law into their own hands.
Everybody defines this kind of thing differently, but in general vigilantism meant that if a man was accused of theft or murder, his fellow citizens might shoot, burn, whip, or hang him in public.
Lynching, often targeting black people, was a mainstay of southern society for two centuries.
In eighteen thirty five in St.
Louis, a black man accused of murder was chained to a tree and burned alive while a thousand people watched and cheered.
And of course that's just to name one of many, many such incidents.
Honor also explains the Old South's penchant for feuds.
When a whole family came to find its honor besmirched, that's when you got feuds.
The Hatfields and McCoys, most famously, with lots of lesser known affairs as well.
The Tuts and Everett's in Missouri, the Turks and the Joneses in Arkansas.
These were common across the antebellum south, and almost anything could start one.
Politics, gambling, personal insults, whatever you like.
These things could go on for years, and as we'll see, though it's not generally appreciated, the greatest feuds of American history happened not in the South, but out in the old West, on the frontiers.
So I think that's the why of Southern violence.
The how of it, an awful lot of the time, was the duel.
Showing 141–160 of 583 · page 8 of 30
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