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). […]
How can we reconcile the sense that recent conspiracy theories can appear – to put not too fine a point on it – crazy, and clear evidence that they have had a broad, if often transient, appeal? Since 9/11, a succession of conspiracy theories have alleged that major incidents like the Aurora cinema shooting, the […]
Spotted in the media this week by the research team, the following story in The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/13/philae-comet-lander-alien-cover-up-conspiracy-theories-emerge
On Tuesday 14th October the writer and broadcaster David Aaronovitch visited the project and gave this public lecture on conspiracy theories in an age of transparency, and discussed more recent conspiracy theories. He also discussed developments since he wrote his book, “Voodoo Histories”.
Professor Olmsted’s (Professor and Chair of History at the University of California, Davis) talk examines British and American anticommunist conspiracy theories in the 1920s and 1930s. In both countries, former wartime intelligence agency chiefs set up private intelligence networks in the post-World War I era to spy upon and blacklist radicals — and, not incidentally, […]
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 […]
Mr Smith’s talk explored how the idea of the mafia and conspiracy emerged in America, developed and became entangled in very different contexts. Mr Smith describes the ideas, experiences, and events through which his book, ‘The Mafia Mystique’ (1975), took shape; the consequences of those events that have led to contemporary public understanding and use […]
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 […]
Why do people believe in conspiracies? This is the way our topic is often framed. It sets the scene for psychological studies aimed at finding out why people would entertain conspiracy theories – the nuttier the better – and, more broadly, how to respond to these dangerous misperceptions, false beliefs and paranoid suspicions. These are […]
We recently had a visit from Joe Parent and Joe Uscinski, associate professors in political science at the University of Miami, who gave a public talk based on their forthcoming book: Conspiracy Theories in America (Oxford University Press). It was a great talk. They’ve put together a highly original data set, and they use […]