A riot or mob violence is a form of civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property, or people.
Teamsters, armed with pipes, riot in a clash with police in the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 during the Great Depression.
Anti-Sarkozy rioters wearing scarves to conceal their identity and filter tear gas in Paris, France in May 2007
New York police attacking unemployed workers in Tompkins Square Park, 1874.
March for Alternative - 25 student anarchist rioters damage storefront windows in protests against the IMF
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Similar attacks against Jews which also occurred at other times and places became known retrospectively as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
The Hep-Hep riots in Würzburg, 1819. On the left, two peasant women are assaulting a Jewish man with pitchfork and broom. On the right, a man wearing spectacles, tails and a six-button waistcoat, "perhaps a pharmacist or a schoolteacher," holds a Jewish man by the throat and is about to club him with a truncheon. The houses are being looted. A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.
Victims of a pogrom in Kishinev, Bessarabia, 1903
A massacre of Armenians and Assyrians in the city of Adana, Ottoman Empire, April 1909
Iași pogrom in Romania, June 1941
