This book examines the “satanic panic” of the 1980s as an essential part of the growing relationship between tabloid media and American conservative politics in the 1980s. It argues that widespread fears of Satanism in a range of cultural institutions was indispensable to the development and success of both infotainment, or tabloid content on television, and the rise of the New Right, a conservative political movement that was heavily guided by a growing coalition of influential televangelists, or evangelical preachers on television. It takes as its particular focus the hundreds of accusations that devil-worshippers were operating America’s white middle-class suburban daycare centers. Dozens of communities around the country became embroiled in trials against center owners, the most publicized of which was the McMartin Preschool trial in Manhattan Beach, California. It remains the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the nation’s history.
This book examines the "satanic panic" of the 1980s as an essential part of the growing relationship between tabloid media and American conservative politics in the 1980s. It argues that widespread fears of Satanism in a range of cultural institutions was indispensable to the development and success of both infotainment, or tabloid content on television, and the rise of the New Right, a conservative political movement that was heavily guided by a growing coalition of influential televangelists, or evangelical preachers on television. It takes as its particular focus the hundreds of accusations that devil-worshippers were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers. Dozens of communities around the country became embroiled in trials against center owners, the most publicized of which was the McMartin Preschool trial in Manhattan Beach, California. It remains the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the nation's history. Sarah Hughes is an independent scholar who received her PhD from Temple University, USA.
A 2024 MICHIGAN NOTABLE BOOK For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., an “intimate and compassionate portrait” (Grace M. Cho) of the Genain quadruplets, the harrowing violence they experienced, and its psychological and political consequences, from the author of The Unfit Heiress. In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame to their fledgling institution. The case of the pseudonymous Genain quadruplets, they soon found, was hardly so straightforward. Contrary to fawning media portrayals of a picture-perfect Christian family, the sisters had endured the stuff of nightmares. Behind closed doors, their parents had taken shocking measures to preserve their innocence while sowing fears of sex and the outside world. In public, the quadruplets were treated as communal property, as townsfolk and members of the press had long ago projected their own paranoid fantasies about the rapidly diversifying American landscape onto the fair-skinned, ribbon-wearing quartet who danced and sang about Christopher Columbus. Even as the sisters’ erratic behaviors became impossible to ignore and the NIMH whisked the women off for study, their sterling image did not falter. Girls and Their Monsters chronicles the extraordinary lives of the quadruplets and the lead psychologist who studied them, asking questions that speak directly to our times: How do delusions come to take root, both in individuals and in nations? Why does society profess to be “saving the children” when it readily exploits them? What are the authoritarian ends of innocence myths? And how do people, particularly those with serious mental illness, go on after enduring the unspeakable? Can the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood help the deeply wounded heal?
Today, pluralism is increasingly the norm and can be seen as a permanent characteristic of modernity. As seen in world events, religion has not become irrelevant but more diverse, giving rise to a complex web of religion and belief minorities, together with intra-plural majorities. Nations seek ways to implement the ideal of freedom of religion, but as this book shows, whether East or West, in the global North or the South, there is no simple formalism for accommodating religious diversity. Different faith communities have competing needs and demands for the same social space, with tensions inevitably arising. This book highlights responses from liberal democracies which enshrine secularism into their constitutions to other constitutions where religion and ethnic identity are enshrined to prioritise their ethno-religious majority. Western and Asian countries encounter different obstacles and challenges. With analysis from 19 international scholars, the book explores different obstacles and responses to accommodation of religious minorities in a range of jurisdictions. In a globalised world, it will be invaluable for comparative legal scholars, for law and religion scholars, researchers and students, and decision-makers, e.g., governments, non-governmental organisations, and for those who seek to better understand the challenges of our time.
After the Flying Saucers Came is a comprehensive account of the stories, the people, and the strange events that went into making the fascination with UFOs and aliens a worldwide phenomenon among believers, skeptics, and the simply curious. It traces how an odd sighting of "flying saucers" by an American pilot in 1947 inspired governments, the media, scientists, writers, and the general public to consider the possibility that extraterrestrials were visiting earth.
The second edition, updated throughout and now including Covid-19 and the 2020 presidential election and aftermath, introduces students to the research into conspiracy theories and the people who propagate and believe them. In doing so, it addresses the psychological, sociological, and political sources of conspiracy theorizing.
A “thought-provoking and timely” (The Times) global history of witch trials across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, told through thirteen distinct trials that illuminate a pattern of demonization and conspiratorial thinking that has profoundly shaped human history. This “inventive and compelling” (Times Literary Supplement) work of social history travels through thirteen witch trials across history, some famous—like the Salem witch trials—and some lesser-known: on Vardø island, Norway, in the 1620s, where an indigenous Sami woman was accused of murder; in France in 1731, during the country’s last witch trial, where a young woman was pitted against her confessor and cult leader; in Lesotho in 1948, where British colonial authorities executed local leaders. Exploring how witchcraft was feared, then decriminalized, and then reimagined as gendered persecution, Witchcraft takes on the intersections between gender and power, indigenous spirituality and colonial rule, political conspiracy and individual resistance. Offering a striking, dramatic journey unspooling over centuries and across continents, Witchcraft is a “well-rounded insight into some of the strangest and cruelest moments in history” (Buzz Magazine), giving voice to those who have been silenced by history.
Intersecting with fan studies, TV and comics studies, queer, disability and feminist studies, as well as popular culture and media scholarship, this collection of essays is the first to offer critical examinations of Riverdale, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the broader Archie/Sabrina comics universe. Its authors interrogate these texts in an effort not only to make sense of their chaotic stories, but to understand our own ongoing fascination with their narratives. Contributing to a greater cultural conversation about representation in media, authors find unexpected value in the oftentimes ridiculous (mis)adventures of the Archie/Sabrina expanded universe.
An entertaining history of the soundtrack of American evangelical Christianity Few things frightened conservative white Protestant parents of the 1950s and the 1960s more than thought of their children falling prey to the "menace to Christendom" known as rock and roll. The raucous sounds of Elvis Presley and Little Richard seemed tailor-made to destroy the faith of their young and, in the process, undermine the moral foundations of the United States. Parents and pastors launched a crusade against rock music, but they were fighting an uphill battle. Salvation came in a most unlikely form. Well, maybe not that unlikely--the long hair, the beards, the sandals--but still a far cry from the buttoned-up, conservative Protestantism they were striving to preserve. Yet when a revival swept through counterculture hippie communities of the West Coast in the 1960s and 1970s a new alternative emerged. Known as the Jesus Movement--and its members, more colloquially, as "Jesus freaks"--the revival was short-lived. But by combining the rock and folk music of the counterculture with religious ideas and aims of conservative white evangelicals, Jesus freaks and evangelical media moguls gave birth to an entire genre known as Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). By the 1980s and 1990s, CCM had grown into a massive, multimillion-dollar industry. Contemporary Christian artists were appearing on Top 40 radio, and some, most famously Amy Grant, crossed over into the mainstream. And yet, today, the industry is a shadow of what it once was. In this book, Leah Payne traces the history and trajectory of CCM in America and, in the process, demonstrates how the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped--and continue to shape--conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism. For many outside observers, evangelical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders are silly expressions of kitsch. Yet Payne argues that these cultural products were sources of power, meaning, and political activism. Throughout, she draws on in-depth interviews with CCM journalists, publishers, producers, and artists, as well as archives, sales and marketing data, fan magazines, merchandise--everything that went into making CCM a thriving subculture. Ultimately, Payne argues, CCM spurred evangelical activism in more potent and lasting ways than any particular doctrine, denomination, culture war, or legislative agenda had before.
In Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference, Chloé Deambrogio explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped American courts' assessments of defendants' mental health and criminal responsibility over the course of the twentieth century. During this period, new psychiatric notions of the mind and its readability, legal doctrines of insanity and diminished culpability, and cultural stereotypes about race and gender shaped the ways in which legal professionals, mental health experts, and lay witnesses approached mental disability evidence, especially in cases carrying the death penalty. Using Texas as a case study, Deambrogio examines how these medical, legal, and cultural trends shaped psycho-legal debates in state criminal courts, while shedding light on the ways in which experts and lay actors' interpretations of "pathological" mental states influenced trial verdicts in capital cases. She shows that despite mounting pressures from advocates of the "rehabilitative penology," Texas courts maintained a punitive approach towards defendants allegedly affected by severe mental disabilities, while allowing for moralized views about personalities, habits, and lifestyle to influence psycho-legal assessments, in potentially prejudicial ways.
