Plots, Designs, and Schemes : American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present.

Plots, Designs, and Schemes : American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present.

This study investigates the long history of American conspiracy theories. Whereas most extant research claims that conspiracy theories have never been more widespread and influential than in the present, the book demonstrates that the opposite is the case. Until far into the twentieth century, consp...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Butter, Michael
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Berlin : De Gruyter, 2014.
Series:Linguae & litterae.
Subjects:
Conspiracy theories > United States.
Online Access: Full text (Emmanuel users only)
Table of Contents:
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1. Mapping American Conspiracism
  • Source I: The Epistemology of Causality
  • Source II: The Ideology of Republicanism
  • Source III: The Heritage of Puritanism
  • Excursion: Conspiracy Theory, Religion, Secularization
  • A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories
  • Chapter 2. Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory
  • Living in the "Devil's Territories": The Stabilizing Conspiracy Theory.
  • "The Devil Hath Been Raised Among Us": The Destabilizing Variant
  • "Church-members ... You & I May Be, & Yet Devils for All That": The Sermons of Samuel Parris
  • "To Countermine the whole PLOT of the Devil": Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World
  • "A Distrustful ... Man, Did He Become": Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"
  • Chapter 3. Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory
  • From Anti-Masonry to Anti-Catholicism.
  • A Partisan Leader and a Few Rebellious Slaves: Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery
  • The Meaning of the Knot: Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"
  • Chapter 5. "Masters of Deceit": Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s
  • Something Old and Something New: The Communist Conspiracy Theory
  • "Damaged Souls": Communism and Other Deviancies
  • Preachers in a Moral Struggle: J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy
  • McCarthy's Mommies: The Manchurian Candidate.
  • Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?)
  • Works Cited.
  • The Invasion Detected: Lyman Beecher's and Samuel Morse's Visions of Conspiracy
  • Dramatizing the Threat to the Republic's Future Mothers: The Convent Captivity Narrative
  • Ambivalent Anti-Catholicism: George Lippard's The Monks of Monk Hall
  • Chapter 4. Abolitionists, "Black Republicans," and the Slave Power: Antebellum Conspiracy Theories
  • The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory
  • The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory.

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