“Murder by Duel,” Humiliation, Challenge, and Homicide, 2009: A Historian’s Dilemma of Judgment
Historians are sometimes called to the witness box in civil trials. Questions about racial discrimination, voting, Indian treaties, tobacco disputes, and historic preservation are among the common subjects. Seldom, if ever, does a member of our profession serve as an expert on some historically pertinent issue in a criminal trial, such as the case of State v. Simpson in January 2009. A distinguished defense attorney, Lacy Wright, Jr., was to open this new vista into American crime and mayhem to a historian, who was, for the first time, called upon to serve as a trial witness. Unless some reader knows of other examples, I can confidently say that I may be the only historian, serving in the name of that profession, ever to be placed in a murder case that involved the ancient practice of the duel. Serving as a witness leads the historian to unexpected and perhaps troubling discoveries. The scholar enters a realm where...