| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Riot and Revelry in Early America. Ed. by William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. viii, 316 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-271-02141-1. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-271-02219-1.)

This exciting collection of essays offers a taste of recent scholarship on protest and celebration in early America. The book's most important contributions probably come in the first half where the essays focus on rough music in early America, a topic that has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. These essays reveal that American colonists used crowd action in much the same ways as contemporaries in Europe did. We meet crowds (sometimes women, sometimes men, sometimes mixed) that assaulted unfaithful or abusive husbands, adulterous women, prostitutes, poor strangers, landlords who tried to evict tenants, and British officials who tried to collect stamp taxes. We see the symbolic disguises: women dressed as boys, men dressed as women, white colonists with blackened faces or dressed as Indians. And we witness the array of punishments: victims forced to ride the rail, dunked in ponds, dragged through puddles, sheared of their hair, or pelted with garbage and (in the case of prostitutes) pennies.

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