What are the 30 incidents listed by the Brennan Center’s guide, with dates and issuing presidents?

Checked on January 26, 2026
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Executive summary

The Brennan Center’s online Guide to Invocations of the Insurrection Act reports that the statute has been used in response to 30 distinct crises since its origins, and the guide presents each incident with the date, the president who invoked the Act, the affected area, and a short description [1]. The publicly available Brennan Center page is the primary source for the full roster; the materials provided to this reporter do not include the guide’s full enumerated list, so this account explains what the guide covers, why it matters, and how to obtain the complete itemized list with dates and issuing presidents [1].

1. What the Brennan Center says at a glance

The Brennan Center frames the Insurrection Act as one of the president’s most potent emergency powers—authorizing federal military deployment within the United States—and traces today’s Act back to the Calling Forth Act of 1792, noting that in the 230 years since then the Act has been invoked in 30 crises and that the guide “presents key information about each incident” including date and president [1]. That summary is the explicit factual baseline available in the provided sources; the guide itself is identified as the repository of the detailed incident-by-incident data [1].

2. Why the complete list matters and what the guide promises

The guide’s core utility is its incident-level documentation: each entry reportedly includes the date of invocation, the president who issued the proclamation, the geographic scope, and a narrative of the precipitating events, and it treats multiple invocations tied to a single event as one entry while citing all relevant proclamations [1]. That structure is important because presidential invocations sometimes come as multiple proclamations or renewals for the same unrest or emergency — the Brennan Center says it collapses such related proclamations into single incidents while preserving citation detail [1].

3. Limits of available reporting for this request

The sources supplied for this inquiry include the Brennan Center’s description of the guide and related Brennan Center materials about emergency powers [1] [2] [3], but the dataset provided here does not include the guide’s full enumerated list of the 30 incidents with their dates and issuing presidents. Therefore it is not possible, based on the supplied reporting, to reproduce the complete 30-item list with precise dates and named presidents in this piece without consulting the Brennan Center’s actual guide page or the underlying proclamations [1] [3].

4. How to get the exact 30-item roster (practical next step)

To obtain the authoritative list with dates and issuing presidents, the Brennan Center’s online “Guide to Invocations of the Insurrection Act” is the primary source indicated in the materials provided and should be consulted directly; that page is explicitly described as presenting “key information about each incident, including the date, the president who invoked the Act, the area that was affected, and a description” [1]. The Brennan Center’s site also contains citation links to the original presidential proclamations and federal records that substantiate each entry [1].

5. Context and caveats readers should weigh

The Brennan Center is a policy and legal research organization that studies executive emergency authorities and advocates for reforms; its guide is a curated dataset produced for public-policy purposes and includes interpretive decisions such as treating multiple proclamations tied to one event as a single incident [1] [2]. That editorial framing and the Brennan Center’s broader work on emergency powers and PEADs (Presidential Emergency Action Documents) are relevant context for readers interpreting the guide’s presentation and emphasis [4] [5].

6. Bottom line

The Brennan Center’s guide documents 30 invocations of the Insurrection Act and promises incident-level details (date, president, scope, precipitating facts), but the supplied reporting does not include the full, enumerated 30-item list; the Brennan Center’s guide page is the source to consult for the exact incidents with dates and issuing presidents [1]. Any reproduction of the full roster requires direct consultation of that guide or the underlying presidential proclamations it cites [1].

Want to dive deeper?
Where can I download the Brennan Center’s full Guide to Invocations of the Insurrection Act and its source citations?
Which presidential proclamations (by date and president) invoked the Insurrection Act during the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras?
How does the Brennan Center decide to group multiple proclamations as a single incident in its Insurrection Act guide?