Plots, Designs, and Schemes
Description
Plots, Designs, and Schemes is the first study that investigates the long history of American conspiracy theories from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Since research in these fields has so far almost exclusively focused on the contemporary period, the book concentrates on the time before 1960. Four detailed case studies offer close readings of the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, fears of Catholic invasion during the 1830s to 1850s, antebellum conspiracy theories about slavery, and anxieties about Communist subversion during the 1950s. The study primarily engages with factual texts, such as sermons, pamphlets, political speeches, and confessional narratives, but it also analyzes how fears of conspiracy were dramatized and negotiated in fictional texts, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown (1835) or Hermann Melville's Benito Cereno (1855).
The book offers three central insights:
1. The American predilection for conspiracy theorizing can be traced back to the co-presence and persistence of a specific epistemological paradigm that relates all effects to intentional human action, the ideology of republicanism, and the Puritan heritage.
2. Until far into the twentieth century, conspiracy theories were considered a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge. As such, they shaped how many Americans, elites as well as "common" people, understood and reacted to historical events. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War would not have occurred without widespread conspiracy theories.
3. Although most extant research claims the opposite, conspiracy theories have never been as marginal and unimportant as in the past decades. Their disqualification as stigmatized knowledge only occurred around 1960, and coincided with a shift from theories that detect conspiracies directed against the government to conspiracies by the government.
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Content
2 - Introduction [Seite 11]
3 - Chapter 1. Mapping American Conspiracism [Seite 42]
3.1 - Source I: The Epistemology of Causality [Seite 47]
3.2 - Source II: The Ideology of Republicanism [Seite 54]
3.3 - Source III: The Heritage of Puritanism [Seite 59]
3.4 - Excursion: Conspiracy Theory, Religion, Secularization [Seite 64]
3.5 - A Historical Typology of American Conspiracy Theories [Seite 66]
4 - Chapter 2. Salem, or: The Metaphysical Puritan Conspiracy Theory [Seite 78]
4.1 - Living in the "Devil's Territories": The Stabilizing Conspiracy Theory [Seite 82]
4.2 - "The Devil Hath Been Raised Among Us": The Destabilizing Variant [Seite 87]
4.3 - "Church-members [.] You & I May Be, & Yet Devils for All That": The Sermons of Samuel Parris [Seite 98]
4.4 - "To Countermine the whole PLOT of the Devil": Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World [Seite 106]
4.5 - "A Distrustful [.] Man, Did He Become": Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" [Seite 115]
5 - Chapter 3. Subversion through Education: The Catholic Conspiracy Theory [Seite 123]
5.1 - From Anti-Masonry to Anti-Catholicism [Seite 128]
5.2 - The Invasion Detected: Lyman Beecher's and Samuel Morse's Visions of Conspiracy [Seite 134]
5.3 - Dramatizing the Threat to the Republic's Future Mothers: The Convent Captivity Narrative [Seite 147]
5.4 - Ambivalent Anti-Catholicism: George Lippard's The Monks of Monk Hall [Seite 164]
6 - Chapter 4. Abolitionists, "Black Republicans," and the Slave Power: Antebellum Conspiracy Theories [Seite 177]
6.1 - The Abolitionist Conspiracy Theory [Seite 184]
6.2 - The Slave Power Conspiracy Theory [Seite 197]
6.3 - A Partisan Leader and a Few Rebellious Slaves: Literary Engagements with Conspiracy Theories about Slavery [Seite 211]
6.4 - The Meaning of the Knot: Conspiracy Theories in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" [Seite 219]
7 - Chapter 5. "Masters of Deceit": Conspiracy Theory in the Great Red Scare of the 1950s [Seite 233]
7.1 - Something Old and Something New: The Communist Conspiracy Theory [Seite 242]
7.2 - "Damaged Souls": Communism and Other Deviancies [Seite 253]
7.3 - Preachers in a Moral Struggle: J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy [Seite 258]
7.4 - McCarthy's Mommies: The Manchurian Candidate [Seite 274]
8 - Conclusion: To the Margins (and Back Again?) [Seite 293]
9 - Works Cited [Seite 312]
