Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture

By Nancy Lusignan

This collection contains twenty-seven new essays on American paranoia drawn from a range of disciplines, including American studies, film studies, history, literature, religious studies, and sociology. It's arranged by topic and largely in chronological order, explore manifestations of fear throughout the history of the United States. Approaching the topic from a variety of perspectives and methodologies, contributors to the collection explore theoretical constructions of fear, religious intolerance in early American culture, racial discrimination, literary expressions of paranoia, and Cold War anxieties, as well as phobias of the modern age and about the future. Together, these essays cover topics from nearly every period of U.S. history, offering a remarkable picture of the "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror" that Roosevelt discerned as such a paralyzing threat on the eve of the Second World War, and which continues to haunt American culture even as we shape our perceptions of the future.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1557531153
• ISBN13: 9781557531155
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Best available work on socio-cultural scapegoating.

Beginning with a readable theoretical treatment of social fear, the authors marshal a relentless serial record of socio-cultural fears, hatreds, and discriminatory campaigns throughout U.S. history. From the Christian converts among Native Americans in New England to alien invaders of today, the focus of the periodic "Plague of Paranoia" has moved across the face of the land and selected people on the bases of a multitude of rationales -- religion and ethnicity, social behavior and gender, and others -- for discrimination, humiliation, and death, always in the name of saving the "good citizens" from some real or imagined evil. Are such plagues an unavoidable negative side to something (fear) that, on the whole, is socially valuable, even necessary? What can we learn of the plagues and their adversaries that can prepare us better to deal with such phenomenon in the future? FEAR ITSELF, besides offering very provocative case studies, provides helpful insights into both the sources and the control of scapegoating behavior.