Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Albrecht Koschnik, Florida State University

The study of popular culture and popular politics in colonial and revolutionary America has gone through several distinct phases. Before the advent of the new social history, historians either placed little significance on the behavior of men and women who rarely explained their thoughts and actions in writing or dismissed them—following the bias of their elite sources—as members of bloodthirsty "mobs" misled by demagogues and ambitious whig politicians. Inspired by European historians, not the least E. P. Thompson and George Rudé, in the late 1960s, Americanists began to argue that "crowds" acted in a profoundly rational and controlled manner.1 It became possible to "read" crowd behavior: a central if not universally shared contention of the work on collective violence posited that common people possessed a "moral economy" that structured economic and social interactions and identified the just means of dealing with infractions of community standards. These studies concentrated on political conflict, protest, and coercion, be it the imperial crisis or local confrontations over the distribution of resources.2 In the last fifteen years, another body of work has emerged, driven largely by the concerns of the new cultural history. Perhaps best represented by Simon P. Newman and David Waldstreicher, it tries to explain the construction of political identities in national celebrations and festive displays, primarily in the early republic rather than during the Revolution.3 While these studies pay detailed attention to partisan conflict and political protest, issues of inequality and the exercise of power in the interaction between commoners and elites—central to the crowd-action literature—have been pushed into the background.

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The collection of essays under review offers the welcome opportunity to assess the state of the field. Riot and Revelry in Early America is largely based on papers first presented at a 1996 conference on "festive culture" hosted by the American Philosophical Society and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia.4 It consists of two introductions—"A Historical Perspective" by William Pencak and "A Folklore Perspective," by Roger D. Abrahams—and ten essays grouped in two sections, "Riot and Rough Music" and "Revelry." The editors' point of departure is the by-now thoroughly established foundational role collective violence, public protest, ritual, and celebration played in the popular political culture and public life of early America. The collection breaks new ground in its sustained attention to rough music in the colonies and during the Revolution, and it allows us to uncover the sources, impact, and change of rough music in unprecedented detail.

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