num_pages: 304
description: Barbara Holland guides us lightheartedly through the touchy subject of honor - and how to defend it - in this compulsively readable history of dueling's first thousand years.The medieval justice of trial by combat evolved into the private duel by sword and pistol with many thousands of honorable gentlemen facing each other ready to die - or to kill - to wipe out an insult or prove a point. Here are their stories from Duma's touchy Three Musketeers to Germany's famed university dueling clubs from Washington's political dueling grounds at Bladensburg to Alexander Hamilton's death in a duel with Aaron Burr and from the New Orleans doctors who settled their medical disagreements under The Oaks to the short-lived newspaper editors of America's South and West.The duel was essential to private public and political life. While it was technically illegal those who followed the elaborate codes of procedure were seldom prosecuted and rarely convicted: they were obeying a grand old tradition. Dueling spread all over the Western world and persisted into the twentieth century and beyond. In the United States the last fatal duel on public record was fought in 1959.Gentlemen's Blood is the definitive guide to this courtly violence from an author called a witty curmudgeon by George Will and a national treasure by the Philadelphia Inquirer. whose style according to Kirkus Reviews fits somewhere between E.B. White ad Andy Rooney.
language: English
title: Gentlemen's Blood: A History of Dueling from Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk
publisher: Bloomsbury