A Skimmington Shaming

Is your neighbor being annoying? Too loud? Coveting another neighbor's wife? What do you do about it?
​In early America, the answer would have been skimmington. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art / The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1966

Read my piece on skimmington in OZY.

If you want to read even more about skimmington and the European traditions it evolved from, check out Riot and Revelry in Early America, a collection of essays about protest and celebration in the United States from the colonial period to the Civil War.