The United States, it has been said, has a history but not a tradition of domestic violence. A history, because violence has been frequent, voluminous, almost commonplace in our past. But not precisely a tradition, for two reasons: First, our violence lacks both an ideological and geographical center; it lacks cohesion; it has been too various, diffuse, and spontaneous to be forged into a single, sustained, inveterate hated shared by entire social classes. Secon, we have a remarkable lack of memory where violence is concerned and have most of our excesses a part of our buried history. -Prologue, Reflections on Violence in the United States

1634 - Relations between the Pilgrims on Plymouth and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were sometimes less than cordial. They disagreed about theology, they disputed over land, and they competed for the Indian fur trade. It was the rivalry for furs that lead to what was perhaps the first American inter-colonial crisis. -Political Violence: Pilgrims versus Puritans