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The cover of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History

Kurt Andersen

How did a nation of dreamers become a place where fact and fantasy blur, traced through five hundred years of American belief?

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At a glance

Author
Kurt Andersen

Why read it

  • You will see how a taste for the implausible has run through American life for five hundred years
  • You will have words to separate a claim tested against evidence from one that only feels true
  • You will notice how entertainment, politics and belief have blended into one another in American life

Who it is for

  • Readers puzzled by how many people believe things that are not so
  • Voters who feel public debate has lost its footing
  • Anyone who wants the long history behind today's conspiracy talk

Contents

  1. Now Entering Fantasyland
  2. PART I
  3. The Conjuring of America: 1517–1789
  4. I Believe, Therefore I Am Right: The Protestants
  5. All That Glitters: The Gold-Seekers
  6. Building Our Own Private Heaven on Earth: The Puritans
  7. The God-Given Freedom to Believe in God
  8. Imaginary Friends and Enemies: The Early Satanic Panics
  9. The First Me Century: Religion Gets American
  10. Meanwhile, in the Eighteenth-Century Reality-Based Community
  11. PART II
  12. United States of Amazing: The 1800s
  13. The First Great Delirium
  14. The All-American Fan Fiction of Joseph Smith, Prophet
  15. Quack Nation: Magical but Modern
  16. Fantastic Business: The Gold Rush Inflection Point
  17. In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Conspiracy Theory Habit
  18. The War Between States of Mind
  19. Ten Million Little Houses on the Prairie
  20. Fantasy Industrialized
  21. PART III
  22. A Long Arc Bending Toward Reason: 1900–1960
  23. Progress and Backlash
  24. The Biggest Backlash: Brand-New Old-Time Religion
  25. The Business of America Is Show Business
  26. Big Rock Candy Mountains: Utopia in the Suburbs and the Sun
  27. The 1950s Seemed So Normal
  28. PART IV
  29. Big Bang: The 1960s and ’70s
  30. Big Bang: The Hippies
  31. Big Bang: The Intellectuals
  32. Big Bang: The Christians
  33. Big Bang: Politics and Government and Conspiracies
  34. Big Bang: Living in a Land of Entertainment
  35. PART V
  36. Fantasyland Scales: From the 1980s Through the Turn of the Century
  37. Making Make-Believe More Realistic and Real Life More Make-Believe
  38. Forever Young: Kids “R” Us Syndrome
  39. The Reagan Era and the Start of the Digital Age
  40. American Religion from the Turn of the Millennium
  41. Our Wilder Christianities: Belief and Practice
  42. America Versus the Godless Civilized World: Why Are We So Exceptional?
  43. Magical but Not Necessarily Christian, Spiritual but Not Religious
  44. Blue-Chip Witch Doctors: The Reenchantment of Medicine
  45. How the Mainstream Enabled Fantasyland: Squishies, Cynics, and Believers
  46. Anything Goes—Unless It Picks My Pocket or Breaks My Leg
  47. PART VI
  48. The Problem with Fantasyland: From the 1980s to the Present and Beyond
  49. The Inmates Running the Asylum Decide Monsters Are Everywhere
  50. Reality Is a Conspiracy: The X-Filing of America
  51. Mad as Hell, the New Voice of the People
  52. When the GOP Went Off the Rails
  53. Liberals Denying Science
  54. Gun Crazy
  55. Final Fantasy-Industrial Complex
  56. Our Inner Children? They’re Going to Disney World!
  57. The Economic Dreamtime
  58. As Fantasyland Goes, So Goes the Nation
  59. BY KURT ANDERSEN

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