About this site

History books love tidy labels. But the truth is, whenever you see the word riot in American history, it usually wasn’t. More often than not, it was a massacre, an uprising, a strike, or a desperate attempt at survival, rebranded as a “riot” to erase responsibility and shame.

This site exists to drag those events back into the light. Each day, one so-called “riot” from U.S. history gets a closer look, what happened, why it mattered, and who paid the price. You’ll notice a pattern: the word “riot” has been weaponized to delegitimize Black resistance, labor organizing, immigrant communities, and anyone else who challenged the status quo.

I’m not a tenured historian with grants and a campus office. I’m an amateur with a library card, a bookshelf, and a habit of digging into the past until the bones rattle. This isn’t meant to be a definitive record, it’s a corrective lens, a way to remember what official narratives worked so hard to bury.

It won’t always be comfortable. Sometimes the events are brutal, sometimes they’re inspiring, and sometimes they’re just forgotten footnotes that deserve better. But taken together, they tell the story of a country that would rather call a massacre a “riot” than face what really happened.

Welcome to Riot-a-Day.