Friday, April 01, 2022

Back in the day …

 A Slap, Followed by a Duel - JSTOR Daily. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Duels didn’t necessarily end in death, but that threat was certainly there. Both the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and the American politician Alexander Hamilton were already well known when they were killed in duels. (Three years before he was killed by Aaron Burr, Hamilton’s son Philip had been killed in a duel.) Before he became President, Andrew Jackson seems to have dueled at the drop of a slight, with one estimate suggesting he dueled over a hundred times, killing at least one person and taking a couple bullets himself in the process.

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