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Crime Waves and Savage Fads From History That Were Just Unnatural

Khalid Elhassan June 18, 2020 35 min

36. A Fashion Police of Violent Youth

Nineteenth-century New York City street thugs. American Yawp

Violent youth gangs roaming city streets and assaulting hapless passersby have probably been around since cities first came into existence. However, it has probably been a long time since such youthful gang violence was driven by an intense dislike of the victims’ fashion choices.

Once America’s youth got it into their heads that, come every September 15^th, they were entitled to yank straw hats off of people’s heads and destroy them, putting that genie back in the bottle became well-nigh impossible. As many newspapers reporting on Pittsburgh’s 1910 straw hat disturbances noted, things were bound to get worse. They were right.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.