Links for August

Mob Violence, Humanzees, WVU troubles, Dating, Homeschooling

Wherever you’re reading this, I appreciate your interest! If you’d like to support Bullfish Hole you can leave a tip at this Stripe link (you can change the amount to anything you want). You can also become a free or paid subscriber at the link below.

Mob Rules

I’ve been busy this month doing the final preparations for my honors course on Collective Violence in American History. I’m thinking to do a series of posts and/or podcasts on riots and other disturbances. But just to give a flavor of things I’ve come across of late:

The New York Doctor’s Riot of 1788: Because cadavers were hard to come by doctors in the 1700s resorted to grave robbing. Physicians from the Columbia School of Medicine tended to target cemeteries for poor and black people, as this was less likely to anger anyone important. But when some black freedmen caught the graverobbers one night, it led to days of rioting throughout the city as angry mobs smashed up hospitals and tried to lynch physicians.

The Battle of Athens in 1946 stands out as an armed insurrection in the US that was actually successful! A group of WW2 veterans came home and began bumping heads with corrupt local political machine. It ends with them grabbing their guns, dynamiting the jail, beating up the sheriff and deputies, and replacing the local government. There’s a “scouring of the shire” vibe to the whole thing.

In 1923 the Ku Klux Klan held a banquet in Steubenville, Ohio. An anti-Klan mob, led by the Catholic group Knights of the Flaming Circle, descended upon them with clubs and bricks. The result was a melee in the streets involving over 2,000 people. Newspaper image courtesy of 1923 Live:

And in case you missed them, my preparations for the class have resulted in long posts on the violent radical groups of the 70s and the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois.