Talk:Dead Rabbits

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I'm with Borisattva, below: The Dead Rabbits as a gang are at best, poorly attested, and at worst, an outright invention. I'm currently working on a book about the period, and the sources that mention the Dead Rabbits can be traced back to contemporaneous news reports that Anbinder (See Below) shows were written by reporters with little understanding of the politics in the immigrant wards of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (The reporting is sensationalistic anyway, as was the convention at the time.) This error is then reproduced and reinforced at length by Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York," and given an academic patina by Luc Sante's (otherwise excellent and fairly careful) "Low Life." A classic example of how the "first draft of history" isn't always corrected.

Worth noting that the first citation in this article is in error. "Gangs in America" doesn't even mention the Dead Rabbits, and in fact contains only a few paragraphs about the period.

In his book "Five Points", Tyler Anbinder asserts that there never was such a gang as the "Dead Rabbits" and provides ample evidence to back it up. 71.125.225.163 03:41, 12 February 2007 (UTC).[reply]

• But what do other books say? It's common for there to be disagreements about history. There may be one book, but what about others? WhisperToMe (talk) 02:43, 16 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  There has been no academic or popular rebuttal to Anbinder's book and related papers which demonstrated that there was never any such gang called the Dead Rabbits, nor were the Bowery Boys a gang per se. Anbinder has been cited supportively, but among academics his findings have been pretty well accepted for the last 20 years. JacksonJLanders (talk) 22:43, 12 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• by claiming that the Dead Rabbits are actually the Roach Guards the first sentence of this page seems to completely contradict an entire and a notably larger article here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Rabbits_riot where the two gangs are described as rivals. does anyone have cit-able references to clarify the two contradictions? Borisattva (talk)

In the book: The languages of Ireland By Michael Cronin, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin Published by Four Courts Press, 2003 Raibead is defined as "big hulking person or thing" not "person to be feared'. Though a very big hulking person may well be feared, it does not appear to be the actual meaning of the word ráibéad.

• The idea that ráibéad is the origin of the term is piece of fanciful nonsense by Daniel Cassidy, an example of fake folk etymology. It's an obscure word, and pronounced 'rawbade', which doesn't actually sound like 'rabbit'. Cassidy speculates that this word, garbled into 'rabbit' and with the English word 'dead' attached as an emphatic, is the origin of the name. This elaborate construction is based on pure speculation, without a shred of evidence to support it. The
  principle of parsimony alone would suggest that the most likely origin of the name is something to do with, well, dead rabbits. --Rbreen (talk) 18:10, 7 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
  ]

Beside being misspelled, is there any evidence that a person of such name was the leader of this gang, other than the Martin Scorsese film?--89.216.166.56 (talk) 13:30, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As Scorsese often does, he walked a fine line between fiction and non fiction in his film “Gangs of NY” and is intentionally confusing in his presentation of both fiction, non fiction, and the gray area in between. “Goodfellas” was also full of scenes and dialogue that was just true enough to be fact but false enough to be fiction. There was indeed a posthumous reference to late “Priest Valon” in an 1850’s NY newspaper article associating him with the Dead Rabbits a decade earlier. This however, was the only known reference, and in fact, “Priest Valon” may have been an urban legend, or a composite of two or more people. This walking the line of fiction and non fiction and subtle or sometimes no so subtle references to what may or may not be non fiction is where some people say his genius is found, others just find it annoying. This is also seen in GONY in that Scorsese takes events of 10 years and extends them into 30, and has non fictional characters interacting, that would never have known each other, as some were not yet born, and others had been long dead. To me, a more non fictional account from William Poole’s (Bill the Butcher) prospective, would have been a lot more interesting Cosand (talk) 02:21, 17 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]