Great riot at the Astor Place Opera House, New York: on thursday evening May 10th 1849 – Historic Print
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: Great riot at the Astor Place Opera House, New York: on thursday evening May 10th 1849, preserved in this antique lithograph. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
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Great riot at the Astor Place Opera House, New York: on thursday evening May 10th 1849
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On the evening of Thursday, May 10, 1849, a crowd gathered outside the Astor Place Opera House in lower Manhattan, and this Currier lithograph records the violence that followed. The disturbance grew out of a bitter rivalry between the American actor Edwin Forrest and the English actor William Charles Macready, whose performance of *Macbeth* drew protesters who saw him as a symbol of English privilege. Militia troops fired into the crowd, and more than twenty people were killed. Nathaniel Currier issued the hand-colored print soon after, one of many topical images his firm produced for a public eager for news.
| Created / published | New York : Published by N. Currier, c1849. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph, hand-colored. |
| Genre | Lithographs Hand-colored 1840-1850. |
| Notes | Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit, MI : Gale Research, c1983, no. 2868 |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 1,071 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-119942 |
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