Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds

Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds

Author: J.P. Chaplin

Publisher: Courier Dover Publications

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0486808033

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Martians, a reincarnated Irish woman, a dead movie star, an insane anesthetist, and an obsessed U.S. Attorney General ― these disparate characters have something in common. Each was at the center of an incident of mass hysteria, in which frightened, grieving, and otherwise disturbed people abandoned their common sense. This fascinating book by a prominent psychologist explores several intriguing case histories of mass hysteria, from "The Great Disappointment" of 1926, in which thousands of believers dressed in white to await Jesus' return, to UFO sightings and other extraordinary phenomena. Author J. P. Chaplin examines historical incidents of mob mentality, including "The Last Days of Rudolph Valentino," which culminated in a New York City riot of 80,000 mourning fans; "The Secrets of the Nunnery," involving the sack of a Boston convent by an angry crowd in search of children's skulls; "The Martians Invade New Jersey," in which a radio drama was mistaken for a news broadcast; and other remarkable instances of mass delusion.


The Influence of Airpower Upon History

The Influence of Airpower Upon History

Author: Robin Higham

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2013-02

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0813136741

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Where will the next generation of farmers come from? What will their farms look like? Fields of Learning: The Student Farm Movement in North America provides a concrete set of answers to these urgent questions, describing how, at a wide range of colleges and universities across the United States and Canada, students, faculty, and staff have joined together to establish on-campus farms as outdoor laboratories for agricultural and cultural education. From one-acre gardens to five-hundred-acre crop and livestock farms, student farms foster hands-on food-system literacy in a world where the shortcomings of input-intensive conventional agriculture have become increasingly apparent. They provide a context in which disciplinary boundaries are bridged, intellectual and manual skills are cultivated together, and abstract ideas about sustainability are put to the test. Editors Laura Sayre and Sean Clark have assembled a volume of essays written by pioneering educators directly involved in the founding and management of fifteen of the most influential student farms in North America. Arranged chronologically, Fields of Learning illustrates how the student farm movement originated in the nineteenth century, gained ground in the 1970s, and is flourishing todayÑfrom the University of CaliforniaÐDavis to Yale University, from Hampshire College to Central Carolina Community College, from the University of Montana to the University of Maine.


Looking for Orthon

Looking for Orthon

Author: Colin Bennett

Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 161640583X

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On November 20, 1952, George Adamski first made contact with extraterrestrials-including a long-haired youth from Venus named Orthon-in the California desert.or so he claimed. He offered photographic proof. He wrote books about his encounters, including the sensational bestseller Flying Saucers Have Landed. He never stopped advocating the truth of his claims even as he came under extraordinary ridicule. And in the process, however inadvertently, Adamski invented the modern mass counterculture. This new edition of Colin Bennett's modern classic posits, in the author's uniquely engaging style, Adamski as a kind of unwitting performance artist who "structured one of the most blatant acts of visionary cheek of the twentieth century," introducing the jittery postwar Western world to the image of the UFO, which confounded and tweaked authority while also fully embodying Cold War neuroses. Whether Adamski was telling the truth or not is almost irrelevant-though Bennett has his own ideas about Adamski's veracity. What remains compelling about Adamski's bizarre and compelling tale of alien visitations is the transformative power of stories, even if they're false, to warp our culture on a grand scale. In the course of a delightfully misspent youth, COLIN BENNETT was employed as both a musician and as a mercenary soldier. He was far better at the second than at the first. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, he is the author of the novels Infantryman and The Entertainment Bomb, and paranormal nonfiction including Politics of the Imagination, a biography of Charles Fort; and An American Demonology, about the head of the 1950s UFO-hunting agency Project Blue Book.


Protest

Protest

Author: John Lofland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1351496158

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This volume addresses three major issues: What are the circumstances in which people elect to protest; what are the forms of such action; and how do people organize to do so? Phrased differently, what are the contexts of protest (collective behavior), personal readiness for protest (conversion), and finally joining together for protest in movement organizations and movement strategies.The key to the book's value is its theoretical sophistication. These studies address in a systematic way fundamental alternatives to organizing protests and outline in detail options for structuring units of social movement. The author deals especially with movement organization locals, including "corps" and "cells." Such units are examined in terms of how they coexist and how they exist sequentially through time. Several case studies of movement organization are included, such as the Unification Church and Mankind United.The work places a heavy emphasis on protest action or strategy. In the final section four chapters examine the entire gamut of strategic possibilities, ranging from polite politics to violent action. Protest is a distinctive and complex strategy. The work carefully evaluates varieties of protest that have become significant in the 1980s. In each section of the book Lofland draws out underlying themes and issues that interrelate the studies and places protest in the larger context of political and social change and theories to date.


Revisiting Decadence

Revisiting Decadence

Author: Lia Ross

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2010-02-19

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1443820237

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This volume is an introduction to the fifteenth century through chronicles and personal recollections of a diverse group of its French- and English-speaking writers. It revisits some of the principal events and personalities of that era through anecdotes illustrating interpersonal behavior. It examines how writers evaluated the conduct of their contemporaries and how some of their pessimistic conclusions may have contributed to the reputation for decadence of their century.


Sensational News

Sensational News

Author: Jeremy Agnew

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1476692319

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Sensationalistic stories have attracted readers for as long as reading has been a popular form of entertainment. Readers have been frightened, revolted, yet fascinated by stories of death, thievery, kidnapping, murder, rape, scandal, love triangles, and colorful miscreants. Starting in the 1830s this morbid interest in lurid stories fueled the unprecedented growth of sensationalist newspapers that titillated and shocked their many readers. This study of sensationalism describes how newspapers added lurid details to their coverage of news events in an effort to attract as many readers as they could. Employing hyperbole and exaggerated details, they meant to grab the attention of the reader and keep him or her reading. For the next hundred years this form of journalism continued, later spilling over into radio and television news. Along the way, the "yellow journalism" wars of the 1880s and 1890s produced bold headlines, eye-catching illustrations, exaggeration of news events, and even false quotes and misleading information. Sensational reporting continued with muckraking reporting in the early 1900s as journalistic crusaders worked to expose municipal corruption, corporate greed, and misconduct in American business.


Social Psychology

Social Psychology

Author: Ralph Turner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 750

ISBN-13: 1351489720

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""A valuable compendium: broad In scope, rich In detail: It should be a most useful reference for students and teachers."" This is how Alex Inkeles of Stanford University described this text. It is made more so in this paperback edition aimed to reach a broad student population in sociology and psychology. The new Introduction written by Rosenberg and Turner brings the story of social psychology up to date by a rich and detailed examination of trends and tendencies of the 1980s.Although social psychology is a major area of specialization in sociology and psychology, this text Is the first comprehensive and authoritative work that looks at the subject from a sociological perspective. Edited by two of the foremost social psychologists in the United States, this book presents a synthesis of the major theoretical and empirical contributions of social psychology.They treat both traditional topics such as symbolic interaction, social exchange theory, small groups, social roles, and intergroup relations, and newer approaches such as socialization processes over the life cycle, sociology of the self, talk and social control, and the sociology of sentiments and emotions. The result is an absolutely Indispensable text for students and teachers who need a complete and ready reference to this burgeoning field.