Riots and Rioters

From the Boston Massacre to the urban riots of the late twentieth century, rioting has been an integral part of American history. Popular disorder has forced acknowledgement of discontent, reshaped the economic order, changed the face of politics, and toppled once-powerful regimes.

In this wide-ranging survey of rioting in America, Paul A. Gilje argues that we cannot fully comprehend the history of the American people without an understanding of the impact of rioting. Riots are when people in the street make themselves heard, when the "inarticulate" become articulate. The history of rioting reveals how the ideas and beliefs of common Americans have shifted over time and how interactions between different groups in society have altered.

Basic to Gilje's approach is the assumption that mobs are rational, that they do not act merely on impulse. Exploring the rationale of the mob, he brings to light the grievances motivating its behavior, and the historical circumstances driving the choices it makes.

Though the specifics vary greatly from event to event and across time, Gilje detects some fascinating patterns. He proposes four phases of rioting in America, arguing that they reflect larger social and economic trends and developments. Gilje's unusual lens makes for an eye-opening view of the American people and their history.

American Mobbing, 1828-1861 is a comprehensive history of mob violence in antebellum America. David Grimsted argues that, though the issue of slavery provoked riots in both the North and the South, the riots produced two different reactions. In the South anti-slavery rioting was widely tolerated and effectively encouraged Southern support for slavery. In the North, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery riots were put down, often violently, by the authorities, resulting usually in a public reaction against slavery. Grimsted thus demonstrates that mob violence was a major cause of the social split that led to the Civil War.

For five days in July 1863, at the height of the Civil War, New York City was under siege. Angry rioters burned draft offices, closed factories, destroyed railroad tracks and telegraph lines, and hunted policemen and soldiers. Before long, the rioters turned their murderous wrath against the black community. In the end, at least 105 people were killed, making the draft riots the most violent insurrection in American history. In this vividly written book, Iver Bernstein tells the compelling story of the New York City draft riots. He details how what began as a demonstration against the first federal draft soon expanded into a sweeping assault against the local institutions and personnel of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party as well as a grotesque race riot. Bernstein identifies participants, dynamics, causes and consequences, and demonstrates that the "winners" and "losers" of the July 1863 crisis were anything but clear, even after five regiments rushed north from Gettysburg restored order. In a tour de force of historical detection, Bernstein shows that to evaluate the significance of the riots we must enter the minds and experiences of a cast of characters--Irish and German immigrant workers, Wall Street businessmen who frantically debated whether to declare martial law, nervous politicians in Washington and at City Hall. Along the way, he offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics: Civil War society and politics, patterns of race, ethnic and class relations, the rise of organized labor, styles of leadership, philanthropy and reform, strains of individualism, and the rise of machine politics in Boss Tweed's Tammany regime. An in-depth study of one of the most troubling and least understood crises in American history, The New York City Draft Riots is the first book to reveal the broader political and historical context--the complex of social, cultural and political relations--that made the bloody events of July 1863 possible.

This study draws together scholarship on the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its aftermath. Contributors hope to draw attention to the tragedy, to honour its victims, and to bring a clear historical voice to the debate over its legacy.

This book makes an original contribution to the history of the English Revolution and to the meaning of crowd behavior. It recreates one of the most famous episodes, in which crowds from Essex and Suffolk attacked and plundered the houses of the gentry, and sought to "ethnically cleanse" their communities of Catholics. The deeper perspective offered by history shows that this action was not "blind violence": the book deciphers the logic that informed the crowd's behavior, and finds evidence of both the importance--and reach--of puritanism and popular parliamentarianism.

Did the police lose control of themselves in dealing with demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention? Or were they simply men who saw themselves as protecting their city from the forces of revolution? Kusch contends that Chicago's police were more than unthinking "thugs," that they had, in effect, become a counterculture, even more so than the people they ended up attacking. From Polish and Irish working class backgrounds, these men felt they represented a time gone by, a different way of life. The world they found themselves in during August of 1968 was an almost alien environment. Analyzing interviews of men who were on the streets and examining in-depth their actions and the reasons behind them, Kusch challenges traditional thinking on this pivotal event.