American Hysteria

For our season finale, we will be exploring our ultimate human fear, our number one cognitive dissonance that arguably leads to all our American hysterias, all our archetypes, beliefs, and delusions, our moral panics. We’ll be taking at look at the historical progression of how Americans have dealt with mortality starting with a place known as the Disneyland of Death, then traveling back to learn about the Puritan idea of the Good Death, and then see how the mass casualties of the Civil War and Lincoln’s embalmed corpse changed our relationship to bodies and immortality, all the way up to the present day tech billionaires funding strange new science to live forever. But we’ll also explore how, historically, the deaths of Black people have been treated in an almost polar opposite way to the deaths of white people, and how the echoes of this reality reach into the present day. Through a psychological concept known as the Terror Management Theory, we’ll try to understand how this uniquely human knowledge of our inevitable deaths shapes our psychology, society, and culture.We will be taking a hiatus for the summer but please stay with us, stay subscribed, follow us on social media or if you can, become a Patron. We love you all so much, thank you for being the best audience we could ever hope for <3American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcastConsider donating to the nonprofits and organizations we mentioned in this episode.This week's #AmericanHysteriaBookClub (on Instagram) Worm at the Core by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The national and international protests over the death of George Floyd have generated larger and more widespread conversations about systemic racism in the United States. We hope to use our platform to help provide context and understanding around our shared moment in history, to show how our past creates our present, and to help illuminate how anti-Black racism has been passed on through our culture and politics, changing with each generation but also very much staying the same.Here are some books by Black authors that helped create this episode that we strongly recommend for further reading:The New Jim Crow by Michelle AlexanderStamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. KendiHow to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. KendiChoke Hold by Paul ButlerCatalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross GayThis episode was put together by Chelsey Weber-Smith, Riley Smith, Rod Rodriguez, and Miranda Zickler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like many shows, we are taking a break this week. We will be back next Monday with an audio guide that we hope can provide historical context and understanding around the nation-wide protests. After that we will be back with our season finale. Please take care of yourselves and others.Here are some nonprofits and groups to support:People's Kitchen CollectiveReparationsHomeless BackpacksGiveDirectly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The internet hate campaign known as #gamergate began in February of 2013 when video game developer Zoe Quinn put out a simple, text-based game called Depression Quest that attempted to show players what it was like to live with this illness. After receiving positive reviews and write-ups, a swath of misogynistic trolls in the gaming community took to message boards to rail on the game they saw as a feminist, political correctness conspiracy to infiltrate their male dominated space, and the fire was only stoked by a long-winded “call out” by Zoe’s ex-boyfriend leading to mass harassment including death threats, rape threats, and the leaking of Zoe’s email, social media, phone number, home address, and nude photos.American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosCo-written by Riley SmithCo-produced by Miranda ZicklerBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2014, a young man named named Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree as revenge for the beautiful women who had denied him the sex he believed he was entitled to. In February of 2020, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was presented with one of the highest national honors, a man who has never shied away from his theories about the oppressive forces of “Feminazis.” There are growing subcultures of men who subscribe to the idea that is is American men, not women, who are the true victims of oppression, while at the same time, condoning and even committing violence against women. But we’ll look at the far more gentle roots of both the Involuntary Celibacy culture and Men’s Rights Movement, and how they were once spaces of support and solidarity. In order to understand the problems of toxic masculinity, we’ll have to look at all its victims, not just women, but the men that suffer under its demands as well.Please consider donating to A Call to MenAmerican Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever heard of the Curse of the Lottery? The legend that most, if not all big winners eventually face everything from bankruptcy to untimely death? We’ll explore whether there is any truth to this alleged phenomenon through a handful of stories that both support and refute this modern urban legend, a kind of folkloric Monkey’s Paw story that tells us, be careful what you wish for.American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosCo-written by Riley SmithCo-produced by Miranda ZicklerBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The search for untold riches has always been at the heart of America, from its very beginning as a nation founded on the search for gold. For this episode, we’ll look at several manifestations of this hope to “get rich quick” and the psychology of luck and ritual, of dreams themselves, both dreams of the future, and dreams that predict it. We’ll start with the most modern get rich quick ideas in the style of The Secret, the 2006 self-help book that make Americans believe that all you need to do to become wealthy is to manifest it with your thoughts, and that the poor are poor because they are attracting poverty to themselves. Then we’ll look at the way that the colonies were funded by early lotteries, the strange rituals of treasure hunting, and the way the gold rush changed American psychology. We’ll look too at the stories happening in the background, the far more modest dreams of black enslaved and oppressed people, who had their own rituals and had their own dreams to get rich quick in a different sense, buying their freedom through winning the lottery and finding economic stability through the underground Harlem lottery known as the numbers game. We’ll ask the question of just who can get rich quick and ask if hope is the greatest American hysteria of them all.Please consider donating to Friends of Public School Harlem.Voice acting by Tamika Lawrence, check out her music hereAmerican Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the tragedies of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and the Charleston Church shooting that killed nine black members, the display of monuments and flags representing the fallen Confederacy have been hotly debated. Are they racist symbols of hate or are they symbols of an unshakable Southern pride? Arguing that the American Civil War was fought over states' rights instead of the preservation of slavery, this alternative narrative called The Lost Cause is still taught in the majority of high school classes today. On this episode, we will explore the true reasons for the Civil War in the words of confederate leaders as well as the words of Union president Abraham Lincoln, words which demonstrate that this heroes-versus-villains story isn’t as simple as it seems. We will also trace these monuments and symbols back to the movements for Civil Rights, when most of them were actually constructed, during the second rise of the KKK in the 1920s and the battles over segregation in the 1950s and 60s. We’ll ask the question, does the veneration of the Confederacy really represent Southern pride, or does it degrade it? And more importantly, is the story we tell worth the cost?American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosCo-written by Riley SmithCo-produced by Miranda ZicklerBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this episode we are dissecting the archetype of American rednecks, hillbillies, and those we call white trash, a group often accused of being the “real” racists who make up the deplorable “Trump Country." But we'll be examining who is really to blame, starting with the plantation elites of the 1700s who created categories of race to break up the poor who were revolting against the government, resulting in centuries of brutal slavery and what we now know as white privilege. We’ll look at the region of Appalachia and the construction of the dangerous, deviant, simple minded white hillbilly created by local color writers. I’ll explain how this area’s union battles that united black and white folks in a dramatic fight for their workers’ rights led to the migration of “hillbillies” into cities, eventually aiding in the success of the eugenics movement. By the civil rights era, we’ll see more racial solidarity, with Black Panther Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Party Coalition in the city of Chicago. Soon after, famous “hillbilly horror” movies of the 1970s like Deliverance reinforced and solidified our view of the banjo playing blood-thirsty backwoods idiot who is a direct threat to the white middle class. In the current political climate, those scapegoated as the “real racists” are often the working class rural poor, though history and modern culture tell a very different story.Please consider donating to the Highlander Research and Education CenterAmerican Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode we explore the history of one of the most hipster of trends, how facial hair has come to represent masculinity, the pastoral fantasy, and of course, white supremacy. Whether our men wear beards or go clean-shaven says more than you might expect about the culture of the time, and it certainly says some interesting things about the trend that defines the modern hipster.American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-SmithProduced and edited by Clear Commo StudiosResearch and cowriting assisted by Riley SmithCo-Produced by Miranda ZicklerShow art by RoacheVoice Acting by Will RogersBecome a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!Follow American Hysteria on social media:Twitter: @AmerHysteriaInstagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices