Conspiracy Theories

1 The Pykewater Library W. D. S. Pennington Conspiracy Theories Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Second Edition). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013.

Beck, Richard. We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2015.

Boudon, Raymond. The Art of Self-Persuasion: The Social Explanation of False Beliefs. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1997.

Burnham, John C. How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Burns, Christopher. Deadly Decisions: How False Knowledge Sank the Titanic, Blew Up the Shuttle, and Led America into War. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008.

Byrne, Ruth M. J. The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality.

Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/The MIT Press, 2005.

Cantril, Hadley. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Conrad, Peter. Mythomania: Tales of Our Times, from Apple to Isis. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 2016.

Dean, Jodi. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.

Frankfurter, David. Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Fritze, Ronald H. Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions.

London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2011.

Gallagher, Catherine. Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Goldberg, Robert Alan. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. 2001.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2008.

Holiday, Ryan. Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.

New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin, 2018.

Jacobsen, Annie. The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s TopSecret Military Research Agency. New York, NY: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

Janisse, Kier-La and Paul Corupe, Eds. Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s.

Surrey, UK: FAB Press, 2018.

Konda, Thomas Milan. Conspiracies of Conspiracies: Hos Delusions Have Overrun America.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

2 Konigsbaum, Mark. The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris.

New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2019.

Kossy, Donna. Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief (New Expanded Edition).

Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 1994.

Kossy, Donna. Strange Creations: Aberrant Ideas of Human Origins from Ancient Astronauts to Aquatic Apes. Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2001.

Laycock, Joseph P. Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.

MacLeod, Alan. Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

Merlan, Anna. Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books/Henry, Holt and Company, 2019.

McLeod, Michael. Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009.

Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Mnookin, Seth. The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2012.

Mueller, John. Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. New York, NY: Free Press, 2009.

Muirhead, Russell and Nancy L. Rosenblum. A Lot of People are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Nathan, Debbie and Michael Snedeker. Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt. Lincoln, NE: Basic Books, 2001. Author’s Choice Press/iUniverse, 2001.

Naphy, William G. Plagues, Poisons and Potions: Plague-Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps, c. 1530-1640. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Ofshe, Richard and Ethan Watters. Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.

Olmsted, Kathryn S. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Peebles, Curtis. Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. New York, NY: Berkley Books, 1995.

Phillips, Adam. Terrors and Experts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Quiggin, John. Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Roisman, Joseph. The Rhetoric of Conspiracy in Ancient Athens. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.

3 Saler, Benson, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore. UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

Sandifer, Elizabeth. Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right. Middletown, DE: Eruditorum Press, 2017.

Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Victor, Jeffrey S. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996.

Walker, Jesse. The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2014.

Washington, Peter. Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1996.

Young, Kevin. Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017.