Riot, Risings and Revolution


Book Description

The history of violence in England from the Jacobite uprising of 1715 to the Irish rebellion of 1798, taking in food riots, judicial murder, press-gangs, poaching, duelling and the military. The author also wrote "The Body Politic" and "Inside Right".




Revolting New York


Book Description

"For many, the appearance of Occupy Wall Street seemed so sudden and so surprising it seemed to have come out of nowhere. But Occupy Wall Street was in some sense not unusual: it was part and parcel of a long history of riot, revolt, uprising, and sometimes even revolution that has shaped the city and the larger histories and geographies of which it is part. The history of New York is, in significant part, a history of revolt. Many citizens, activists, and scholars know pieces of that history, but nowhere has it been put together in something close to its entirety. The effect is that each revolt or uprising seems almost sui generis, always surprising, disconnected from both its long- and near-term history and social geography. Revolting New York brings together the historical geography of revolt in New York in its fullness, from the earliest uprisings of the Munsee against Dutch occupation of Manhattan to Occupy. All in a style accessible to a broad as well as academic audience The book will show that there is a continuous, if varied and punctuated, history of rebellion in New York that is at least as vital as the more standard histories of formal politics, planning, economic growth and restructuring that largely define our consciousness of New York's evolution and the structuring of life within it" --




Riot, Unrest and Protest on the Global Stage


Book Description

In this collection, leading international scholars examine riots and protest in a range of countries and contexts, exploring the major social transformations of rioting and the changing dynamics, interpretation and potency of unrest in a globalised era.




Girls to the Front


Book Description

“Not only a historical rockument of the revolutionary 90s counterculture Riot Grrrl movement. . . but also a rousing inspiration for a new generation of empowered rebel girls to strap on guitars and stick it to The Man.” — Vanity Fair Girls to the Front is the epic, definitive history of the Riot Grrrl movement—the radical feminist punk uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s, altering America’s gender landscape forever. Author Sara Marcus, a music and politics writer for Time Out New York, Slate.com, Pos, and Heeb magazine, interweaves research, interviews, and her own memories as a Riot Grrrl front-liner. Her passionate, sophisticated narrative brilliantly conveys the story of punk bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy—as well as successors like Sleater-Kinney, Partyline, and Kathleen Hanna’s Le Tigre—and their effect on today’s culture.




Riots in Literature


Book Description

Riots in Literature addresses representations of crowd disorder as manifestations of popular politics, including colonial and postcolonial contexts. The terms used to describe disorder are themselves, of course, contested. Words like “mob,” “demonstration” and “protest,” not to mention “riot’ itself, denote a particular perspective based on an elitist taxonomy for dealing with social and cultural phenomena in society. Of primary concern is the way in which the text describes and designates crowd behaviour using the language of denigration, metaphors of the primitive and animalistic, brutal images, and silences, and where the mediation of the event is expressed in terms of the binary order/disorder. The contributors to this volume are interested in the analysis of the interaction of official political culture and crowd politics as represented in literature and orature, and how such representations contribute to the discourses of authority and subversion of their period. The essays are wide-ranging and explore the phenomenon of riots in literature through studies of popular risings in Shakespeare; Carlyle and the French Revolution; the Rebecca Riots in Wales; popular ballads and the Indian War of Independence in 1857, post-partition riots in India and Pakistan in the 1960s, township violence in South African fiction post-1948, the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles in detective fiction and avant garde disturbances in France of the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the book, these essays focus attention on the tension-filled relationship that is perceived between literature and discourses of power and popular resistance.




Vanishing Coup


Book Description

This thoughtful and engaging book offers the first extended analysis of coups, a central factor shaping world history and politics. Ivan Perkins introduces a new theory to explain why a military coup or revolution is such an unthinkable prospect in advanced democracies. Focusing especially on the first three coup-free states—the Venetian Republic, Great Britain, and the United States—the book traces the evolutionary origins of political violence and the historical rise of republican government. Perkins concludes with a new explanation for the “democratic peace” and shows why coup-free states form enduring alliances.




Riotous Assemblies


Book Description

Riotous Assemblies examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England through the lens of popular disorder. Tackling both the more closely-studied forms of protest, such as food riots, industrial disorders, and political disturbances, and much less well understood occasions of popular disorder, such as tax riots, turnpike riots, riots against the establishment of the militia, and religious riot, Adrian Randall re-engages the study of riot within a wider interpretation of the forces - social, economic and political - which were transforming society. He pays particular attention to disturbances in the years between 1795 and 1812, critically examining how far they indicated the major discontinuities discerned by earlier histories of protest, or whether they retained much of the character of earlier upheaval. Based upon detailed case studies and drawing upon the most recent research, the book extends the focus of earlier studies of protest. It locates the origins of disorder within the concepts of constitutionalism and the free-born Englishman, and argues that older attitudes proved far more tenacious than many have allowed.




Everyday Revolutions


Book Description

Women's everyday choices can engender revolutionary acts. This collection gathers essays that build upon this premise and examines the ways in which eighteenth-century women defied not only the restrictions their own culture sought to enforce, but also the restrictions our historical and literary understandings have created.




A History of Riots


Book Description

A History of Riots is the result of a conference held by the London Socialist Historians Group in early 2012, designed to look again at the historical aspects of riots in the wake of the August 2011 riots in the UK. Many historians had thought that riots were a method of protest and revolt which had given way to more organised forms of expression, from trade unions to political parties, during the course of the nineteenth century. Events have proven this idea to be incorrect. Riots still take place around the world on a regular basis. The contributors to A History of Riots probe various aspects of riots in order to examine the historical issues and concerns that motivate them and dictate their course and to better understand why they take place in the current day. Sean Creighton looks at the Trafalgar Square riots in London in 1887, referred to as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Ian Birchall analyses how riots have been represented in fiction, while Neil Davidson reviews riotous activity around the Scottish Act of Union in 1707. Keith Flett looks at what is sometimes held to be the peak of British riot history, the Chartist period of the 1840s, while John Newsinger offers a different perspective: not a riot inspired by the crowd or the ‘mob’, as media commentators persist in naming protesters, but one driven by authority, a police riot in the US in the 1930s. There are editorial introductions and conclusions that place these specific historical studies of aspects of the history of riots in a wider methodological and theoretical framework, looking at the work of some of the foremost historians of riots, including George Rude, and more recent material by Adrian Randall, Andrew Charlesworth and others. The perspective of the book is clear. Riots are something which is an important part of history, but they also remain part of the present too. In this sense, understanding their history is an important task for historians and all those interested in how, and in what forms, protest develops. This book represents a contribution to, and promotes, a discussion of both the history of riots and how an examination of this can help provide a better understanding of riots today.




The Politics of Provisions


Book Description

The elemental power of food politics has not been fully appraised. Food marketing and consumption were matters of politics as much as economics as England became a market society. In times of dearth, concatenations of food riots, repression, and relief created a maturing politics of provisions. Over three centuries, some eight hundred riots crackled in waves across England. Crowds seized wagons, attacked mills and granaries, and lowered prices in marketplaces or farmyards. Sometimes rioters parleyed with magistrates. More often both acted out a well-rehearsed political minuet that evolved from Tudor risings and state policies down to a complex culmination during the Napoleonic Wars. 'Provision politics' thus comprised both customary negotiations over scarcity and hunger, and 'negotiations' of the social vessel through the turbulence of dearth. Occasionally troops killed rioters, or judges condemned them to the gallows, but increasingly riots prompted wealthy citizens to procure relief supplies. In short, food riots worked: in a sense they were a first draft of the welfare state. This pioneering analysis connects a generation of social protest studies spawned by E.P. Thompson's essay on the 'moral economy' with new work on economic history and state formation. The dynamics of provision politics that emerged during England's social, economic and political transformations should furnish fruitful models for analyses of 'total war' and famine as well as broader transitions elsewhere in world history.