Kyle Riismandel teaches American history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, and is the author of Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001. He joins us to explain how fear became an organizing ideological principle of the American suburbs in the post-Vietnam era, as hysteria about crime, sexual deviance, drugs, and Satan himself drove suburbanites to an obsession with security, surveillance, and policing that continues to haunt the American landscape.
