In 1940s New York, FBI alarm bells are ringing: the Existentialists are coming! J. Edgar Hoover has to know: what the hell is this Existentialism all about anyway – and is it some kind of code for Communism? He sets his agents on the trail of first Jean-Paul Sartre (1945) and then Albert Camus (1946). […]
Are conspiracy theories overtaking deliberative societies, inflaming discourse and degrading democracy? How much more prone to violence are conspiracy theorists? Which political party is more likely to traffic in conspiratorial talk? Has the Internet ushered in a new era of conspiracy-fueled paranoia? Using original data sources spanning more than a century, Joseph E. Uscinski and […]
Following their visit last term talking about their forthcoming book on American Conspiracy Theories, Joe Parent and Joe Uscinski wrote a piece for the CRASSH blog on the pitfalls and the benefits of collaborative writing. And so saying, we’ve put together a short piece for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage political science blog, discussing their […]
Professor Sir Richard Evans, Principal Investigator and overall director of the project spoke at this year’s Hay Festival (a celebration of Literature and the Arts) as part of the Cambridge Series events this past week. The Times (subscription) reported: Why the plot is thicker for Americans The International Business Times reported: JFK Assassination, 9/11 attacks, Diana’s Death: Why […]
Intrigued by Alfred’s post about Uscinski’s and Parent’s claim that conspiracy theorising has been on the decline since the JFK assassination, I went looking on Google’s Ngram Viewer (which ransacks the 5.2 million books that Google had digitised up to 2008) to see what could be gleaned from the books database. Here’s the result: Conclusion: […]
Here’s a link to a blog post from American political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, trailing their forthcoming book, “American Conspiracy Theories” (Oxford University Press, 2014). Among the interesting results, they claim that conspiracy theorizing in America has actually been on the decline since the JFK assassination: Our analyses suggest the overall level of conspiracy theorizing […]
Just came on this in my Twitterstream!
At our Festival of Ideas gig on Wednesday someone asked a question that none of us had ever considered: how do conspiracy theories end? Tony Badger took it on, and talked about how the anti-communist hysteria of Senator Joe McCarthy’s time had endured over time, taking different forms in different eras, right down to the […]
Don DeLillo’s gripping and brilliantly written novel “Libra”( 1988) tells the disturbing life-story of Lee Harvey Oswald. It presents him as the tool of three disaffected CIA operatives who want to galvanise the USA into retaliation against Cuba by engineering the assassination of President Kennedy and ensuring it is attributed to Cuban agents. The story […]
Brooding on the conspiracy theories surrounding what happened to Building 7 in 9/11, I fell to thinking about frame 313 of the famous Zapruder film of the assassination of JFK (which, at least until the advent of YouTube must have been the most-watched home movie in history). Here’s how Ron Rosenbaum, writing in the Smithsonian […]