Download or read book A Sympathetic History of Jonestown written by Rebecca Moore and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the People's Temple written with compassion and understanding, with special focus on the surviving family members of two of the victims. This work seeks to dispel the bizarre image propagated by the media.
Download or read book Gone from the Promised Land written by John R. Hall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this superb cultural history, John R. Hall presents a reasoned analysis of the meaning of Jonestown--why it happened and how it is tied to our history as a nation, our ideals, our practices, and the tension of modern culture. Hall deflates the myths of Jonestown by exploring how much of what transpired was unique to the group and its leader and how much can be explained by reference to wider social processes.
Download or read book A Thousand Lives written by Julia Scheeres and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jonesopened a church in Indianapolis called Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church. He was a charismatic preacher with idealistic beliefs, and he quickly filled his pews with an audience eager to hear his sermons on social justice. As Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers leaned on each other to recapture the sense of equality that had drawn them to his church. But even as the congregation thrived, Jones made it increasingly difficult for members to leave. By the time Jones moved his congregation to a remote jungle in Guyana and the US government began to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late. A Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told. New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from tens of thousands of recently declassified FBI documents and audiotapes, as well as rare videos and interviews, to piece together an unprecedented and compelling history of the doomed camp, focusing on the people who lived there. The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children. In South America, however, they found themselves trapped in Jonestown and cut off from the outside world as their leader goaded them toward committing “revolutionary suicide” and deprived them of food, sleep, and hope. Vividly written and impossible to forget, A Thousand Lives is a story of blind loyalty and daring escapes, of corrupted ideals and senseless, haunting loss.
Download or read book The Road to Jonestown written by Jeff Guinn and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of the cult leader behind the Jonestown Massacre examines his personal life, from his extramarital affairs and drug use to his fraudulent faith healing practices and his decision to move his followers to Guyana, sharing new details about the events leading to the 1978 tragedy.
Download or read book Salvation and Suicide written by David Chidester and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-16 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the first edition: "[This] ambitious and courageous book [is a] benchmark of theology by which questions about the meaningful history of the Peoples Temple may be measured." —Journal of the American Academy of Religion Re-issued in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the mass suicides at Jonestown, this revised edition of David Chidester's pathbreaking book features a new prologue that considers the meaning of the tragedy for a post-Waco, post-9/11 world. For Chidester, Jonestown recalls the American religious commitment to redemptive sacrifice, which for Jim Jones meant saving his followers from the evils of capitalist society. "Jonestown is ancient history," writes Chidester, but it does provide us with an opportunity "to reflect upon the strangeness of familiar . . . promises of redemption through sacrifice."
Download or read book Dear People written by Denice Stephenson and published by Heyday Books. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Denice Stephenson describes the heartbreaking tragedy of Jonestown---the idealistic community movement that preceded it--presented in text and photos from the Peoples Temple Archive.
Download or read book Seductive Poison written by Deborah Layton and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-08-18 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this haunting and riveting firsthand account, a survivor of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple opens up the shadowy world of cults and shows how anyone can fall under their spell. A high-level member of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple for seven years, Deborah Layton escaped his infamous commune in the Guyanese jungle, leaving behind her mother, her older brother, and many friends. She returned to the United States with warnings of impending disaster, but her pleas for help fell on skeptical ears, and shortly thereafter, in November 1978, the Jonestown massacre shocked the world. Seductive Poison is both an unflinching historical document and a suspenseful story of intrigue, power, and murder.
Download or read book Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple written by Rebecca Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-07-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth investigation of Peoples Temple and its tragic end at Jonestown corrects sensationalized misunderstandings of the group and places its individual members within the broader context of religion in America. Most people understand Peoples Temple through its violent disbanding following events in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 Americans committed murder and suicide in a jungle commune. Media coverage of the event sensationalized the group and obscured the background of those who died. The view that emerged thirty years ago continues to dominate understanding of Jonestown today, despite the dozens of books, articles, and documentaries that have appeared. This book provides a fresh perspective on Peoples Temple, locating the group within the context of religion in America and offering a contemporary history that corrects the inaccuracies often associated with the group and its demise. Although Peoples Temple had some of the characteristics many associate with cults, it also shared many characteristics of black religion in America. Moreover, it is crucial to understand how the organization fits into the social and political movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: race, class, colonialism, gender, and other issues dominated the times and so dominated the consciousness of the members of Peoples Temple. Here, Rebecca Moore, who lost three family members in the events in Guyana, offers a framework for U.S. social, cultural, and political history that helps readers to better understand Peoples Temple and its members.
Download or read book Gone from the Promised Land written by and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If we are to learn anything of value from the murders and mass suicide at Jonestown, its history must be salvaged from popular myths, which are little more than super cial atrocity tales. In this superb cultural history, John R. Hall presents a reasoned analysis of the meaning of Jonestown: why it happened and how it is tied to our history as a nation, our ideals, our practices, and the tensions of modern culture. Hall de ates the myths of Jonestown by exploring the social character of Jim Joness Peoples Temple-how much of what transpired was unique to the group and its leader and how much can be explained by reference to wider social processes?
Download or read book Imagining Religion written by Jonathan Z. Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review
Download or read book Snake Dance written by Laurie Efrein Kahalas and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Survivor's riveting tale. Leftwing, interracial church transplants to utopia overseas. Premeditated government conspiracy destabilizes and destroys. Breathtaking, one-of-a-kind tour-de-force.
Download or read book Stories from Jonestown written by Leigh Fondakowski and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The saga of Jonestown didnOCOt end on the day in November 1978 when more than nine hundred Americans died in a mass murder-suicide in the Guyanese jungle. While only a handful of people present at the agricultural project survived that day in Jonestown, more than eighty members of Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, were elsewhere in Guyana on that day, and thousands more members of the movement still lived in California. Emmy-nominated writer Leigh Fondakowski, who is best known for her work on the play and HBO film "The Laramie Project," spent three years traveling the United States to interview these survivors, many of whom have never talked publicly about the tragedy. Using more than two hundred hours of interview material, Fondakowski creates intimate portraits of these survivors as they tell their unforgettable stories. Collectively this is a record of ordinary people, stigmatized as cultists, who after the Jonestown massacre were left to deal with their grief, reassemble their lives, and try to make sense of how a movement born in a gospel of racial and social justice could have gone so horrifically wrongOCotaking with it the lives of their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters. As these survivors look back, we learn what led them to join the Peoples Temple movement, what life in the church was like, and how the trauma of JonestownOCOs end still affects their lives decades later. What emerges are portrayals both haunting and hopefulOCoof unimaginable sadness, guilt, and shame but also resilience and redemption. Weaving her own artistic journey of discovery throughout the book in a compelling historical context, Fondakowski delivers, with both empathy and clarity, one of the most gripping, moving, and humanizing accounts of Jonestown ever written.
Download or read book Why Waco written by James D. Tabor and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1993 government assault on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, resulted in the deaths of four federal agents and eighty Branch Davidians, including seventeen children. Whether these tragic deaths could have been avoided is still debatable, but what seems clear is that the events in Texas have broad implications for religious freedom in America. James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher's bold examination of the Waco story offers the first balanced account of the siege. They try to understand what really happened in Waco: What brought the Branch Davidians to Mount Carmel? Why did the government attack? How did the media affect events? The authors address the accusations of illegal weapons possession, strange sexual practices, and child abuse that were made against David Koresh and his followers. Without attempting to excuse such actions, they point out that the public has not heard the complete story and that many media reports were distorted. The authors have carefully studied the Davidian movement, analyzing the theology and biblical interpretation that were so central to the group's functioning. They also consider how two decades of intense activity against so-called cults have influenced public perceptions of unorthodox religions. In exploring our fear of unconventional religious groups and how such fear curtails our ability to tolerate religious differences, Why Waco? is an unsettling wake-up call. Using the events at Mount Carmel as a cautionary tale, the authors challenge all Americans, including government officials and media representatives, to closely examine our national commitment to religious freedom.
Download or read book New Historical Literary Study written by Jeffrey N. Cox and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, growing out of the celebrated turn toward history in literary criticism, showcases some of the best new historical work being done today in textual theory, literary history, and cultural criticism. The collection brings together for the first time key representativesfrom various schools of historicist scholarship, including leading critics whose work has helped define new historicism. The essays illuminate literary periods ranging from Anglo-Saxon to postmodern, a variety of literary texts that includes The Siege of Thebes, Macbeth, The Jazz Singer, and The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, and central issues that have marked new historicism: power, ideology, textuality, othering, marginality, exile, and liberation. The contributors are Janet Aikins, Lawrence Buell, Ralph Cohen, Margaret Ezell, Stephen Greenblatt, Terence Hoagwood, Jerome McGann, Robert Newman, Katherine O'Keeffe, Lee Patterson, Michael Rogin, Edward Said, and Hortense Spillers. The editors' introduction situates the various essays within contemporary criticism and explores the multiple, contestatory issues at stake within the historicist enterprise.
Download or read book White Nights Black Paradise written by Sikivu Hutchinson and published by Sikivu Hutchinson. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1978, Peoples Temple, a Black multiracial church once at the forefront of progressive San Francisco politics, self-destructed in a Guyana jungle settlement named after its leader, the Reverend Jim Jones. Fatally bonded by fear of racist annihilation, the community's greatest symbol of crisis was the "White Night"; a rehearsal of revolutionary mass suicide that eventually led to the deaths of over 900 church members of all ages, genders and sexual orientations. White Nights, Black Paradise focuses on three fictional black women characters who were part of the Peoples Temple movement but took radically different paths to Jonestown: Hy, a drifter and a spiritual seeker, her sister Taryn, an atheist with an inside line on the church s money trail and Ida Lassiter, an activist whose watchdog journalism exposes the rot of corruption, sexual abuse, racism and violence in the church, fueling its exodus to Guyana. White Nights, Black Paradise is a riveting story of complicity and resistance; loyalty and betrayal; black struggle and black sacrifice. It locates Peoples Temple and Jonestown in the shadow of the civil rights movement, Black Power, Second Wave feminism and the Great Migration. Recapturing black women's voices, White Nights, Black Paradise explores their elusive quest for social justice, home and utopia. In so doing, the novel provides a complex window onto the epic flameout of a movement that was not only an indictment of religious faith but of American democracy.
Download or read book A Historical Introduction to the Study of New Religious Movements written by W. Michael Ashcraft and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American public’s perception of New Religious Movements (NRMs) as fundamentally harmful cults stems from the "anticult" movement of the 1970s, which gave a sometimes hysterical and often distorted image of NRMs to the media. At the same time, academics pioneered a new field, studying these same NRMs from sociological and historical perspectives. They offered an interpretation that ran counter to that of the anticult movement. For these scholars in the new field of NRM studies, NRMs were legitimate religions deserving of those freedoms granted to established religions. Those scholars in NRM studies continued to evolve methods and theories to study NRMs. This book tells their story. Each chapter begins with a biography of a key person involved in studying NRMs. The narrative unfolds chronologically, beginning with late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century perceptions of religions alternative to the mainstream. Then the focus shifts to those early efforts, in the 1960s and 1970s, to comprehend the growing phenomena of cults or NRMs using the tools of academic disciplines. The book’s midpoint is a chapter that looks closely at the scholarship of the anticult movement, and from there moves forward in time to the present, highlighting themes in the study of NRMs like violence, gender, and reflexive ethnography. No other book has used the scholars of NRMs as the focus for a study in this way. The material in this volume is, therefore, a fascinating viewpoint from which to explore the origins of this vibrant academic community, as well as analyse the practice of Religious Studies more generally.
Download or read book Deadly Cults written by Robert L. Snow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-11-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a Vampire Cult differ from a Satanic Cult? How do seemingly normal or ordinary citizens suddenly find themselves committed to a group whose leader promotes criminal activities and isolation from families and friends? What should you do if a loved one becomes indoctrinated by a potentially dangerous cult? This book focuses on various cults and their often criminal belief systems. Most readers are shocked by stories of mass suicides and ritualized cult killings, but few understand how such crimes come to be committed. Snow, a seasoned police officer with experience working on cult crimes, examines those cults that commit offenses from murder and fraud to kidnapping and sexual assault. By providing specific accounts of dangerous cults and their destructive acts, Snow illustrates how seemingly innocent groups can turn pernicious when under the sway of a charismatic leader with an agenda, or when members take things too far. He offers advice on how to avoid falling victim to cult indoctrination, concluding with chapters on how to identify cults, how to protect yourself and your family, and what to do if a loved one is ensnared by such a group.
