American Conspiracism: An Interdisciplinary Exploration

This important collection explores the social effects of popular American conspiratorial beliefs, featuring the work of 22 scholars representing multiple academic disciplines.

This book aims to better understand the phenomenon of American conspiracism by investigating how people acquire their beliefs, how conspiratorial stories function in politics and society, the role of conspiracy theories in the formation of national identities, and what conspiratorial beliefs mean to individual believers. Topics include QAnon, the Boogaloo Boys, the satanic panic, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination, the Great Replacement Theory, anti-Catholic nativism, Flat Earth belief, Elvis Lives, COVID-19 denial, and much more. Each essay is accessibly and engagingly written without compromising quality.

American Conspiracism is essential reading for students of psychology, political science, and U.S. history, as well as journalists, independent researchers, and anyone interested in American conspiracies.

Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Luke Ritter, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Political Science, New Mexico Highlands University, USA. He is the author of Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West (2021).