Riot and Revelry in Early America

Abstract

Edited by Anya labour and Revelry in Early America. Edited by William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 316. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $22.50.)Like many books that grow out of scholarly conferences, this one is hard to summarize. The book's first section, Riot and Rough Music, includes three essays on rural unrest and two on more explicitly political crowd actions in Boston and Philadelphia. The second section, simply titled Revelry, brings together five essays on diverse postrevolutionary topics. Elites and common folk, African Americans and Indians appear as historical actors in studies that use race, gender, and social rank as analytical categories. The authors employ bewildering array of terms-riot, revelry, rough music, skimmington, festivals-to describe organized public displays of opinion by people out-of-doors. Authors writing on the period before 1780 draw heavily on-and sometimes respond directly to-scholarly work on European festivals and crowds. Those whose focus is the early republic have as their chief frame of reference the wealth of recent literature on Independence Day celebrations and other civic festivals in the postrevolutionary era.There are two introductions, one by historian William Pencak and second by folklorist Roger D. Abrahams. Although historians study riots and festivals to gain political and social insights into particular times and places, Abrahams notes, folklorists seek in the same phenomena a thread leading to very ancient past (30). Pencak, who attempts to draw meaningful generalizations from the book's extremely diverse contents, suggests that, taken together, the essays reveal the of both rural and urban folk to which, in turn, explodes the notion that the 'lower sort' deferred to their 'betters' and largely allowed them to manage colonial political and economic life (14). The festivities of the early republic, though often orchestrated by elites, he notes, nonetheless revealed social tensions and conflict as women, African Americans . . . and working people modified, disrupted, or created counter-festivities that were highly political acts reflecting alternate visions of social order (14).The five essays in the book's first section amply demonstrate this propensity to riot, at least among residents of the northern colonies. Steven J. Stewart discovered nineteen instances of skimmington rides-which featured processions, insults, taunts, and the painful carrying of the victim out of town on rail-in New England and the Middle Colonies between 1733 and 1775. Colonists used this technique to punish those who repeatedly flouted social norms at time when increasingly anglicized courts were less likely to prosecute such offenses. Brendan McConville's fine analysis of rough music-which included skimmingtons and other popular extralegal methods of enforcing community norms-in eighteenth-century New Jersey suggests that such incidents occurred mainly in areas settled by New Englanders whose descendants sought to perpetuate Puritan values. In striking contrast to European crowds, New Jersey people used extralegal violence mostly against abusive and adulterous men-not women-though their activities became more unambiguously political in the context of land title disputes and imperial unrest during the 1760s. Thomas J. Humphrey's less subtle and less convincing analysis of rough music in colonial New York likewise emphasizes similarities between the Hudson Valley tenant insurgency and the Albany Stamp Act riots. …

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