The Taming of the American Crowd: From Stamp Riots to Shopping Sprees

The Taming of the American Crowd offers a unique blend of popular culture and working class history—written with great flair. Sandine is one of the few scholars reckless and ambitious enough to take on a wide-ranging subject without sacrificing analytical rigor. If you’ve ever participated in a demonstration, gone crazy in the bleachers, or danced all night, you’ll love this book.

—Barbara Ehrenreich

Sandine has given us a timely and indispensable book.The Taming of the American Crowd is not only a spirited tour through centuries of crowd action and crowd control but a searching meditation on today’s consumer-crazy, politically passive Americans, who have squandered the power of the assembled populace to address enormous inequalities in power and wealth and to serve as an instrument for protest and change.

—Gary B. Nash, UCLA, director of the National Center for History in the Schools, past president of the Organization of American Historians

Riots and mobs, celebrations and demonstrations! An entertaining journey into American history that also manages to illuminate the soul of the country, its need for social protest and community as an antidote to despair and the key to a less predatory future.

—Ariel Dorfman novelist, playwright, essayist

professor of literature and Latin American Studies, Duke University

Al Sandine traces the rambunctious history of American crowds in a lively and erudite narrative that celebrates their power as a political tool of the masses. He issues a timely warning about the importance of the right of assembly and the simple fact that despite their advantages, online social media lack the political punch of people in the streets.

—Linda Lumsden assistant professor of journalism, University of Arizona

Building on the tradition of European social historians E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and George Rude, Al Sandine, in this well-written and provocatively argued book, brings the crowd back to the center of U.S. historical and social analysis. In-so-doing, he makes innovative contributions to social movement analysis, and to urban and consumer sociology.

—E. Kay Trimberger

visiting scholar at The Institute For The Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley; author of The New Single Woman