![]() ![]() And the word uprising has even more positive connotations it can describe a popular groundswell that is advancing and forcing the world to recognize it exists. The word rebellion, for example, suggests organization and more purposeful resistance to systemic oppression. So some people have eschewed that word in favor of alternatives with more respectable undertones. ![]() These days, while the word riot may call to mind important historical events, it also conjures plenty of negative images - like football fans setting cars on fire after their team wins the Super Bowl, senseless destruction that is wrought by an aimless, irrational mob. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter But, over the ensuing decades - as that term lost some of the proud patina it carried in a time defined by anti-war protests, radical feminism and black power - that would change. “All of that made the word riot distinctly attractive,” Stein says. “What better way to say ‘we too matter and we too can revolt’” than by embracing the language that was being used to describe their profound discontent? That word and its fiery undertones also ran counter to the stereotype that LGBT people were effeminate and ashamed, too weak and too unwilling to resist. The gay rights movement was already taking inspiration from African-Americans fighting for civil rights in the 1960s, explains Marc Stein, a history professor at San Francisco State University and author of The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History. “There has been a debate about the meaning of Stonewall,” says Columbia University history professor George Chauncey, “from the very beginning.” Disagreements over what to call Stonewall reflect different conceptions of what it was. That’s why, for instance, some Southerners have called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression and why some Catholic textbooks offer lessons about the Protestant Revolt rather than the Protestant Reformation. The terminology that people use shapes how historical events are perceived, from the way they came to happen to why they matter. This is not just a matter for copy editors. After police raided the New York City bar and sparked protest from patrons, were there riots? Was there an uprising? Was it a rebellion? But while there is broad agreement that something seismic happened there one fateful night in 1969, there is little consensus on anything else - including how people should talk about it. The Stonewall Inn has become to the modern LGBT rights movement what Lexington and Concord were to the American Revolution. ![]()
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