Word: mobbing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mob action was so common and in the eyes of many so legitimate as to constitute, by 1776, a conventional method of political action. The Boston Tea Party was hardly an isolated case: the mob also rioted to keep food from being shipped out of the colony during lean times, to prevent men from being impressed into the British navy, and to halt the collection of unpopular customs duties. The men who made up these mobs were, as likely as not, also the men to be found sitting in New England town meetings and on local juries...
Accordingly, these were not mobs in the modern sense-that is, collections of unrelated roustabouts looking for fun or profit. As University of Massachusetts Historian Pauline Maier has written: "The Boston mob was so domesticated that it refused to riot on Saturday and Sunday nights, which were considered holy by New Englanders." Indeed, often the "mob" served quite legal ends, as when the hue and cry was set up to apprehend a thief, or when measures had to be taken to deal with public health problems. Small wonder, then, that a member of a mob was rarely convicted...
...Catholics, Masons and Mormons were attacked and their buildings burned), partly political (the early anti-slavery agitation), and partly sporting (the drunker members of volunteer fire companies enjoyed pitched battles on their way to or from a conflagration). As many as a thousand lives may have been lost to mob action in the decades preceding the Civil...
...enforcement had been set in ways that have endured to the present. The community had ceased to be self-regulating and had turned over more and more functions once performed by families and neighbors to policemen, wardens, penitentiaries, almshouses and asylums. The police could maintain order-the mob was no longer tolerated-but they could not prevent crime; they could enforce laws, but not unpopular ones; criminals might fear prison, but they were not reformed by it. With immigration approaching flood levels, the normal disputes over the nature of public order and the sources of criminality were intensified by ethnic...
...into an army barracks bordering the square and set it afire. Black smoke could be seen drifting over the opulent tiled roofs of the adjacent Forbidden City and into the drizzly gray sky of North China. Early in the evening Peking's mayor Wu Teh addressed the churning mob through powerful loudspeakers, ordering them to disperse. Thousands of militiamen and soldiers marched into the square to restore order. In all, more than 1,000 people were arrested, and throughout the night 1,000 militiamen stood guard with fixed bayonets at the Martyrs' Monument to prevent another outbreak...