Milloy and Baltimore--Lessons from History

Courtland Milloy in the Post has a column on Baltimore:

"From history, they should have learned important lessons about the self-defeating nature of rioting. Baltimore, like many other urban cities, is still scarred from the burning and looting that occurred in 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. More than a thousand businesses in that city were destroyed, many of them black owned."

It's a point I like, having experienced the 1968 riots in DC.  But I'm trying to think of any history book, or even journalistic book, which got praise as "the" account of a riot in a major city, and I can't remember one.  I'm sure there have been such books, but I don't remember an outstanding one.