Ebook: American violence: a documentary history

With eyewitness accounts and contemporary reports'linked together by succinct analytical commentaries'Richard Hofstadter and his young collaborator, Michael Wallace, have created a superb documentary reader that is, in effect, a history of violence in America through four centuries. Here, as experienced by men and women who lived through them, are not only the familiar, chilling eruptions'Harper's Ferry; the Civil War draft riot in New York; Homestead; Centralia; the Detroit ghetto; the assassinations of Lincoln, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy'but also less commonly remembered episodes, such as the New York slave riots of 1712, the doctors' riot of 1788, vigilante terror in Montana, the anti-Chinese riot in Los Angeles in 1871, and the White League coup d'etat of 1874 in New Orleans. In his extensive introduction, Richard Hofstadter shows how, in the face of the record, Americans have had an extraordinary ability to persuade themselves that they are among the best-behaved and the best-regulated of peoples. With more than one hundred entries, the editors have documented and put into perspective the thread of violence in American history whose rediscovery'as Hofstadter suggests'will undoubtedly be one of the most important intellectual legacies of the 1960's. The book clearly demonstrates, even as the reader comes to grips with long-eluded truths, that America's consistent history of violence has not yet breached beyond hope of restoration our long record of basic political stability, that most social reforms in the United States have been brought about without violence.;Reflections on violence in the United States / Richard Hofstadter -- I. Political violence. Pilgrims versus Puritans, 1634 ; Battle of the Severn, 1655 ; Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 ; Bloody election in Philadelphia, 1742 ; Knowles riot in Boston, 1747 ; Stamp Act riots, 1765 ; Boston massacre, 1770 ; Battle of the Alamance, 1771 ; Terrorism against Loyalists, 1774-1775 ; Whiskey Rebellion, 1794 ; Philadelphia election riot, 1834 ; Christiana affair, 1851 ; Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1861 ; Baltimore election riot, 1856 ; Harper's Ferry, 1859 ; New Orleans coup d'́état, 1874 -- II. Economic violence. Bread riot in Boston, 1713 ; Mast tree riot, 1734 ; New Jersey tenant riots, 1745-1754 ; New York agrarian rebellion, 1766 ; Shays's Rebellion, 1786-1787 ; Anti-bank riot in Baltimore, 1835 ; Flour riot in New York, 1837 ; Squatters' riots, 1850 ; Railroad strike, 1877 ; Louisiana sugar strike, 1887 ; Homestead, 1892 ; Coeur d'Alene, 1892 ; Pullman strike, 1894 ; Wheatland riot, 1913 ; Ludlow, 1913-1914 ; Steel strike, 1919 ; Herrin massacre, 1922 ; Chicago eviction riot, 1931 ; Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, 1935 ; Memorial Day massacre, 1937 -- III. Racial Violence. Slave revolts and their suppression: New York slave revolt, 1712 ; Louisiana uprising, 1811 ; Vesey uprising, 1822 ; Nat Turner, 1831 ; Texas slave insurrection, 1860 -- Race riots: Providence, 1831 ; Cincinnati, 1841 ; New York Draft Riot, 1863 ; New Orleans, 1866 ; Vicksburg, 1874 ; Wilmington, 1898 ; Atlanta, 1906 ; East St. Louis, 1917 ; Chicago, 1919 ; Tulsa, 1921 ; Detroit, 1943 -- Ghetto riots: Harlem, 1935 ; Watts, 1965 ; Detroit, 1967 -- Some casualties of conquest: The Paxton riots, 1763-1764 ; Cheyenne massacre, 1864 ; Wounded Knee massacre, 1890 ; Brutalities in the Philippines, 1899-1902 -- IV. Religious and ethnic violence. Persecution of Quakers, 1656-1661 ; Burning of Ursuline Convent, 1834 ; Anti-Mormon riot, 1838 ; Philadelphia Nativist riots, 1844 ; Pentecost riot in Hoboken, 1851 ; Louisville, 1855 ; Mountain Meadows massacre, 1857 ; Orange riot, 1871 ; Anti-Chinese riot in Los Angeles, 1871 ; Rock Springs massacre, 1885 ; Anti-Italian riot in New Orleans, 1891 ; Zoot-suit riot, 1943 -- V. Anti-radical and police violence. Anti-abolition riot in New York, 1834 ; Tompkins Square, 1874 ; Everett massacre, 1916 ; May Day riot in Cleveland, 1919 ; Centralia, 1919 ; Dearborn massacre, 1932 ; Bonus army, 1932 ; Peekskill riot, 1949 ; Freedom riders, 1961 ; Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 ; Chicago, 1968 -- VI. Personal violence. Hamilton-Burr duel, 1804 ; Jackson-Dickinson duel, 1806 ; Sand Bar gun battle, 1827 ; Assault on Charles Sumner, 1856 ; The Hatfields and the McCoys, 1873-1888 ; Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1881 -- VII. Assassinations, terrorism, political murders. Murder of Lovejoy, 1837 ; Assassination of Lincoln, 1865 ; Assassination of Garfield, 1881 ; Haymarket, 1886 ; Attempted murder of Henry Clay Frick, 1892 ; Assassination of Frank Steunenberg, 1905 ; Dynamiting of Los Angeles Times, 1910 ; Wall Street bombing, 1920 ; Murder of Medgar Evers, 1963 ; Murder of Malcolm X, 1965 ; Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 1968 -- VIII. Violence in the name of law, order, and morality. Doctors' riot, 1788 ; Portland whorehouse riot, 1825 ; Vicksburg gamblers, 1835 ; Astor Place riot, 1849 ; San Francisco Vigilance Committee, 1856 ; Montana vigilantes, 1863-1865 ; Cincinnati riot, 1884 ; Lynching at Memphis, 1893.