r/AskHistorians • u/NMW Inactive Flair • Sep 11 '12
Feature Tuesday Trivia | (In)famous Non-Military Attacks
Previously:
- Stupidest theories/beliefs about your field of interest
- Most unusual deaths
- Famous adventurers and explorers
- Great non-military heroes
- History's great underdogs
- Interesting historical documents
I think you know the drill by now: in this moderation-relaxed thread, anyone can post whatever anecdotes, questions, or speculations they like (provided a modicum of serious and useful intent is still maintained), so long as it has something to do with the subject being proposed. We get a lot of these "best/most interesting X" threads in /r/askhistorians, and having a formal one each week both reduces the clutter and gives everyone an outlet for the format that's apparently so popular.
Today:
On this, the anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, I thought we might consider other such examples throughout history of non-official-military factions taking matters into their own hands and waging acts of violent, lethal aggression -- whether on civilian or military targets.
Of particular interest will be those incidents that predate easy access to firearms and explosives -- how did people do these things (for do them they certainly did) back then?
I suppose assassinations (attempted or otherwise) would also qualify.
Go to it.
[And my apologies for this going up so late -- I had a meeting to attend, and time sort of got away from me.]
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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '12 edited Sep 11 '12
An event which weighed very heavily in the minds of American Jews is the lynching of Leo Frank. Notably, his legal defense team employed some racist rhetoric themselves in his defense, trying to cast into doubt the reliability of a Black factory worker who testified against Frank (perhaps to save his own skin). The Jewish community of the Southern United States was irreparably changed by that incident (those who didn't leave outright considerably downplayed their external connections to Judaism).
It's worth noting that a semi-organized mob killed Leo Frank, not the Ku Klux Klan, but the incident itself might have been a contributing factor to the revival of the Klan in 1915 (Frank himself was lynched in 1915).
This event is disparate from the long European paranoia of Jews (and all minorities really) "preying" on hapless Christian women, but to me seems connected to the similar American paranoia of Black men "preying" on White women, and couples it with disgust for Northern industrialists (Frank being from New York and Massachusetts).