The street as stage: protest marches and public rallies since the nineteenth century

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Crowd studies and studies of 'social protest' - food riots, rough music and charivari, iconoclasm and religious violence, rick-burning and machine-breaking, but also insurrections, contentious gatherings, and all forms of tumultuous assembly - became one of the earliest achievements of social history during the 1960s. Inspired by George Rudé and Charles Tilly, soon to be joined by Edward Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis, a wealth of new research began accumulating, concentrated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but rapidly expanding across periods and societies. Recuperating the coherence behind seemingly irrational collective actions, this work profoundly changed how the forms of popular politics can be understood, shaping varied repertoires of inquiry that have continued to unfold ever since.

In defining the distinctiveness of this fine collection of essays, Matthias Reiss sees a key break in the 1990s, with the end of the dominance of social history, suggesting that interest then shifted from an older 'focus on class and social conflict' and 'the often limited direct sociopolitical impact of organized public protest' to a 'new focus ... on its various forms and meanings'. As he puts it, 'The interest of those who still did research in this field shifted from the instrumental aspects of public protest...