I've just been looking at my copy, decades old, of The Penguin Book of Fights, Feuds and Heartfelt Hatreds, an anthology edited by Kerr. He did an incredibly shoddy job. There is a section on the Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton duel titled Aaron Burr is Provoked to Fight Colonel Hamilton. In his brief paragraph of introduction Kerr again refers to 'Colonel' Hamilton, but in the text (taken from an 1884 biography of Burr) Hamilton is always 'General' Hamilton. There are no further editorial notes, so the reader is not given even the really rather interesting tidbit of info that Burr was the US vice-president at the time of the duel, nor told that three years beforehand Hamilton's eldest son had been killed in a duel on the same site.
Another chapter is J Edgar Hoover's War Against Martin Luther King. Here Kerr does provide some editorial clarification for the reader. The very first sentence of the extract reads, "Hoover's intelligence service to [Lyndon B.] Johnson was performed, of course, covertly..." Thanks, Phil, we now know for sure which Johnson the text is referring to. However, at this point he gave up. The next couple of pages twice refer to LBJ's 'executive order of 8 May'. From the context this order clearly had something to do with Hoover and his leadership for the FBI, but as to learning exactly what this was, Kerr decided his readers should have to wait for the invention of the internet.
