historical violence database
Riots in the United States
Paul A. Gilje
Compiled by Peter Tuchin
(October 2009 version)
The data were gathered by Paul Gilje of the University of Oklahoma for his studies of the history of riots in America from colonial times to the present. His sources and methods are described in The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) and in Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). The data consist of an image file of Gilje’s note cards on each of the riots he discovered in the course of his research, as well as a spreadsheet created by Peter Tuchin of the University of Connecticut, who is working on the history of political instability in the United States. The spreadsheet is not yet complete—it contains information on about 3,900 of the 5,200 riots in Gilje’s notecards. If anyone would like to volunteer to enter the remaining 1,300 cases, we’d appreciate it!
Image file
Spreadsheet