Riots

How the May Day Protests Stayed Peaceful

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edwin S. Grosvenor | June 2020

During the Black Panther trials in New Haven 50 years ago this summer, a remarkable group of leaders helped calm a boisterous crowd of protesters.

Editor’s Note: In May 1970, my Yale classmate, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., and I watched National Guard soldiers roll heavy tear-gas machines across the historic New Haven Green.

How the May Day Protests Stayed Peaceful

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edwin S. Grosvenor | June 2020

During the Black Panther trials in New Haven 50 years ago this summer, a remarkable group of leaders helped calm a boisterous crowd of protesters.

Editor’s Note: In May 1970, my Yale classmate, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., and I watched National Guard soldiers roll heavy tear-gas machines across the historic New Haven Green.

The Great Railroad War of 1877

Paul Dickson | Spring 2020

The nation was torn apart by disastrous riots in a hundred cities and towns, with lasting results.

Baltimore Riot

Spring 2011

After Fort Sumter fell, a secessionist mob in Baltimore rioted and blocked the passage of Federal troops to Washington, D.C

The Race Riots in Manhattan in 1863

Kevin Baker | March 2003

A five-day uprising by Irish immigrants in New York was ostensibly against the draft, but was in fact a chance for Irish mobs to attack and murder as many black people as possible.

Kevin Baker, our “In The News” columnist, has just published a historical novel called Paradise Alley.

The Battle of Athens

Lones Seiber | February/March 1985

The GIs came home to find that a political machine had taken over their Tennessee county. What they did about it astounded the nation.

In McMinn County, Tennessee, in the early 1940s, the question was not if you farmed, but where you farmed. Athens, the county seat, lay between Knoxville and Chattanooga along U.S. Highway 11, which wound its way through eastern Tennessee.

The West Virginia Mine War

Cabell Phillips | August 1974

BLOOD FLOWED IN THE PERENNIALLY TROUBLESOME COALFIELDS IN 1921, WHEN THOUSANDS OF MINERS DECIDED THEIR RIGHT TO ORGANIZE WAS WORTH FIGHTING FOR

On the morning of August 1, 1921, the Gazette of Charleston, West Virginia, carried under an eight-column banner on its front page the following dispatch from the city of Bluefield:

A Rough Sunday At Peekskill

Roger M. Williams | April 1976

Paul Robeson was giving a concert. It ended in a riot that foreshadowed the McCarthy era of the 1950’s

In most ways and in most places, Labor Day weekend in 1949 was the quiet, lazy end-of-summer occasion that Americans long have cherished.

New York’s Bloodiest Week

Lawrence Lader | June 1959

The draft riots of 1863 turned a great city into a living hell.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.