US Political Violence Database, 1780–2010 (Turchin)

The event-level database behind every instability figure in THE COUNTED CROWD: 1,855 raw rows, 1,602 valid after the author’s own duplicate and exclusion codes, each event dated, typed (riot, lynching, rampage, assassination, terrorism, insurrection), subtyped, and sourced. The companion paper (Journal of Peace Research, 2012, https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf) supplies the published shape of the record: instability peaks around 1870, 1920, and 1970, and the calm stretches between.

Scope of this record, stated plainly. The essay’s decomposition figures (41% of events race-coded, 42% of fatalities, 438 lynching episodes, the 1860–1879 fatality concentration) were computed directly from the downloaded file by this studio on 2026-08-06; the computation lives in the public predictive-history repository (06_TESTS/e9_psi/who_is_the_crowd.md) and can be re-run from the file this url names. The codings are Turchin’s team’s judgments, and the essay’s claims inherit that: this record supports “the record counts,” never “history was.” The “age of concord” phrasing for the 1940–1960 trough follows Turchin’s own characterization as relayed in Richerson’s review of Ages of Discord (Cliodynamics 8, 2017).