Dead Streets: The Dead Rabbits Riot and the Birth of American Urban Violence

On the night of July 4, 1857, a column of Irish immigrant men marched out of New York City's Five Points slum and the most consequential city in the Western Hemisphere lit itself on fire. What followed - two days of urban insurrection that paralysed Lower Manhattan, drove the Metropolitan Police from the streets, and required military suppression - has been remembered ever since under a name that was never the rioters' own: the Dead Rabbits Riot.

John Joyce-Kelly's Dead Streets is the definitive account of those two days and everything that made them inevitable. Drawing on police precinct logs, militia operational orders, census records, and the scholarship that has systematically dismantled the popular mythology, Joyce-Kelly reconstructs the real story: a Famine-scarred immigrant community pushed beyond endurance, a police force destroyed by its own political masters, a city whose institutions had catastrophically failed, and a fight born of structural failure, not Irish criminality.

The Dead Rabbits, it turns out, never existed. The men on the barricades had their own names, their own reasons, and their own account of what they were defending. Dead Streets restores those names to the record - and makes the case that the truth about July 1857 is more disturbing, and more important, than the legend that replaced it.

John Joyce-Kelly grew up in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland, and has spent the better part of three decades trying to understand what happened to the people who left. Trained in social history and drawn from an early age to the intersection of poverty, politics, and collective violence, he has written and lectured on the Irish diaspora experience in Britain and America, with a particular interest in the communities that formed in the immigrant slums of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The story of the Dead Rabbits Riot found him through a digitised edition of the New York Times from July 1857, and he has never quite managed to put it down. He lives and writes in Dublin.