Astor Place Riots Essay

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We focused on choosing a topic that really came true to the National History Day theme of taking a stand. We chose the Astor Place Riots, which occurred on May 10th, 1849 in Manhattan, New York City, because it represented people taking a stand for the actors Edwin Forrest (American) and William Charles Macready (English). The riots were one of the most catastrophic events in New York history. We went into research for the two actors’ background, and the full details of the riots. We chose this topic because we wanted to work on a project that had deep history and something that not many people have heard of. We started our research by visiting many articles that we searched on Google. Finding all of our secondary sources was easy. Primary sources were a bit harder to find because our topic is older. We went deep into finding primary sources, such as going to the library and finding books on the Astor Place Riots. We also found many pictures that showed actual evidence of the riots and the intensity of the event.
The majority of our research came from the internet. We would start off by googling some important words from our topic such as Shakespeare Riots, May 10th, 1849, and the two actors. This helped us to find secondary sources and it came very easy. For primary …show more content…

We even found a newspaper on the internet that serves as a primary source. One of the excerpts we found is called “Account of the terrific and fatal riot at the New York Astor Place Opera House”, which was a very useful source. On Amazon we found a book published by Nigel Cliff in 2007 called, “The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America”. Many of the pictures we found were showcasing how intense and violent the riots were and really gave a look into what the riots actually looked like. The images were very useful and we plan on using them for our

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