Andrew Porwancher is the Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College and an Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He will tell the blood-soaked tale of Nicholas Dukes and Captain Adam Nutt, two politicians in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania who engaged in a lethal duel after one confessed to seducing the other's daughter. The resulting murder trial captivated the national imagination and reveals much about a society torn between the conventions of the past and the demands of the future. The Dukes-Nutt saga also suggests that the code of honor was not unique to the American South but a national phenomenon that transcended regional divides in the Gilded Age.