Charles Tilly is currently Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University. Tilly has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited 50 published books and monographs. He has also published between 600 and 700 scholarly articles, reviews, review-essays, comments, chapters in edited collections, and prefaces not counting reprints, translations, and working papers. His most recently published books are Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (2004), Social Movements, 1768–2004 (2004), Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective (co-authored and co-edited with Maria Kousis, 2005), Trust and Rule (2005), Why? (2006), Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (co-authored and co-edited with Robert Goodin, 2006), Contentious Politics (co-authored with Sidney Tarrow, 2006), and Democracy (2007). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. He has received numerous international prizes and honorary degrees.

How can we get inside popular collective struggles and explain how they work? Contentious Performances presents a distinctive approach to analyzing such struggles, drawing especially on incomparably rich evidence from Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The book accomplishes three main things. First, it presents a logic and method for describing contentious events, occasions on which people publicly make consequential claims on each other. Second, it shows how that logic yields superior explanations of the dynamics in such events, both individually and in the aggregate. Third, it illustrates its methods and arguments by means of detailed analyses of contentious events in Great Britain from 1758 to 1834.