Interesting piece of history! But I disagree with the assessment on the part of the author: > There’s something both grimly funny and profound to me about the

Interesting piece of history! But I disagree with the assessment on the part of the author: > There’s something both grimly funny and profound to me about the riot... all over the personal jealousies of two vain and insecure actors No, it was not over the personal jealousies of the actors. That was just the spark. If you look carefully at the text, it was over an act of genocide on the part of the British Empire (the Irish famine, in which a million people died), and over increasing inequality culminating in the Gilded Age (I should say now, the first Gilded Age) in which, every time the GDP went up, most of the population were condemned to even more miserable and desperate poverty. Put that way, the riot doesn't seem so ridiculous, does it?