Butter Plots, Designs, and Schemes

American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-3-11-034693-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 332 Seiten

Reihe: ISSN

is the first study that investigates the long history of American conspiracy theories from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Since research in these fields has so far almost exclusively focused on the contemporary period, the book concentrates on the time before 1960. Four detailed case studies offer close readings of the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, fears of Catholic invasion during the 1830s to 1850s, antebellum conspiracy theories about slavery, and anxieties about Communist subversion during the 1950s. The study primarily engages with factual texts, such as sermons, pamphlets, political speeches, and confessional narratives, but it also analyzes how fears of conspiracy were dramatized and negotiated in fictional texts, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1835) or Hermann Melville's (1855).

The book offers three central insights:

1. The American predilection for conspiracy theorizing can be traced back to the co-presence and persistence of a specific epistemological paradigm that relates all effects to intentional human action, the ideology of republicanism, and the Puritan heritage.

2. Until far into the twentieth century, conspiracy theories were considered a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge. As such, they shaped how many Americans, elites as well as “common” people, understood and reacted to historical events. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War would not have occurred without widespread conspiracy theories.

3. Although most extant research claims the opposite, conspiracy theories have never been as marginal and unimportant as in the past decades. Their disqualification as stigmatized knowledge only occurred around 1960, and coincided with a shift from theories that detect conspiracies directed against the government to conspiracies by the government.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Butter, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Acknowledgements;7
2;Introduction;11
3;Chapter 1. Mapping American Conspiracism;42
3.1;Source I: The Epistemology of Causality;47
3.2;Source II: The Ideology of Republicanism;54
3.3;Source III: The Heritage of Puritanism;59
3.4;Excursion: Conspiracy Theory, Religion, Secularization;64
3.5;A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories;66
4;Chapter 2. Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory;78
4.1;Living in the “Devil’s Territories”: The Stabilizing Conspiracy Theory;82
4.2;“The Devil Hath Been Raised Among Us”: The Destabilizing Variant;87
4.3;“Church-members […] You & I May Be, & Yet Devils for All That”: The Sermons of Samuel Parris;98
4.4;“To Countermine the whole PLOT of the Devil”: Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World;106
4.5;“A Distrustful […] Man, Did He Become”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”;115
5;Chapter 3. Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory;123
5.1;From Anti-Masonry to Anti-Catholicism;128
5.2;The Invasion Detected: Lyman Beecher’s and Samuel Morse’s Visions of Conspiracy;134
5.3;Dramatizing the Threat to the Republic’s Future Mothers: The Convent Captivity Narrative;147
5.4;Ambivalent Anti-Catholicism: George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall;164
6;Chapter 4. Abolitionists, “Black Republicans,” and the Slave Power: Antebellum Conspiracy Theories;177
6.1;The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory;184
6.2;The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory;197
6.3;A Partisan Leader and a Few Rebellious Slaves: Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery;211
6.4;The Meaning of the Knot: Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”;219
7;Chapter 5. “Masters of Deceit”: Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s;233
7.1;Something Old and Something New: The Communist Conspiracy Theory;242
7.2;“Damaged Souls”: Communism and Other Deviancies;253
7.3;Preachers in a Moral Struggle: J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy;258
7.4;McCarthy’s Mommies: The Manchurian Candidate;274
8;Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?);293
9;Works Cited;312

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Butter, Universität Wuppertal.

Michael Butter, Universität Wuppertal.