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.