Fear Itself: Enemies Real & Imagined in American Culture
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Book Description
Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In his 1933 Inagural Address, Roosevelt recognized that American culture has been particularly susceptible to imagining and persecuting enemies in every dark corner of its history, with some devastating results. From its colonial beginnings, America has feared the new, the different, the marginal, and has historically cast outsiders as being in league with Satan. Fear Itself explores the continuum of fear that has centered on enemies real and imagined in American culture. 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. Its 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.
Fear Itself: Enemies Real & Imagined in American Culture,Nancy Lusignan Schultz,Purdue University Press,1557531153,Civilization,Customs & Traditions,Fear,Popular Culture - General,Psychology,Social Science,Social aspects,Sociology,United States,United States - General
Fear Itself: Enemies Real & Imagined in American Culture
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