SOAN Colloquium_ September 2019

Wednesday, September 25, 2019 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Johnson Center, Meeting Room D

Speaker: Zachary Schrag, Professor of History at George Mason University

"Nativist Mobs in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia"

In the spring and summer of 1844, Philadelphians fought with fists, sticks, bricks, stones, torches, sabers, bayonets, pistols, shotguns, muskets, rifles, and cannon. In May, nativist Protestants marched into an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Kensington, to the north of the city of Philadelphia, provoking the very disorder they claimed to fear. Heckling turned to fistfights, fistfights turned to gunfights, and by the end of three days of fighting, at least nine men were dead or mortally wounded, and two Catholic churches lay in ashes. After eight weeks of superficial calm, Protestants learned that Catholics were stockpiling weapons in a church in Southwark, to the south of the city. Mobs surrounded the church and even bombarded it with cannon stolen from a nearby ship. To prevent a third church-burning, hundreds of militiamen marched into Southwark. When the crowd attacked them with stones and bricks, the troops fired their muskets, sparking a nighttime battle in which both sides discharged cannon down city streets. By morning, another 13 men were dead or dying. The scale of the violence and the hatred it revealed shocked observers in Philadelphia and around the Atlantic. Professor Schrag seeks colleagues’ insight about how comparative and theoretical perspectives can help explain the politics of intolerance, the eruption of mob violence, and the resort to lethal force by the authorities.

 


 

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