Nineteenth-Century Collective Violence: Toward a North American Context‪.‬

Scott W. See, "Nineteenth-Century Collective Violence: Toward a North American Context," Labour/Le Travail, 39 (Spring 1997), 13-38. UNTIL ALMOST A QUARTER CENTURY AGO, the theme of violence in North American history focused primarily on the extraordinary events that definitively shaped the course of republicanism, democracy, and freedom. To most historians, violence invoked panoramic images of revolution, civil war, and rebellion. Violence in post-Conquest Canadian history, outside the parameters of the Upper and Lower Canadian Rebellions of the late 1830s and the Red River and North West Rebellions of the late 19th century, seemed to be an obvious and mildly amusing oxymoron. In the United States, on the other hand, generations of historians had concentrated their energies on those most profound and almost mesmerizing events in the American saga: the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. The story of collective or group violence in North America, meaning spontaneous or planned demonstrations and confrontations outside the political arena, seemed anecdotal at best. Historians lightly touched upon those events or passed them over altogether because they appeared ill-suited to give citizens of either nation-state an enriched sense of their collective experience. The decade of the 1960s, however, kindled a modest yet vibrant anthology of historical literature on less well-known episodes of violence in each country's past.