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Peterloo Massacre, in English history, the brutal dispersal by cavalry of a radical meeting held on St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester on August 16, 1819. The ā€œmassacreā€ (likened to Waterloo) attests to the profound fears of the privileged classes of the imminence of violent Jacobin revolution in England in the years after the Napoleonic Wars. To radicals and reformers Peterloo came to symbolize Tory callousness and tyranny. The August meeting was the culmination of a...