About the Author
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Conspiracy thinking is very old in democratic politics. Cold War culture was saturated with conspiratorial hypotheses. Both anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism thrived on nightmares of elaborate, subversive, underground connections. The American Revolution's success hinged on the patriots' growing sense that they were threatened not merely by this or that tax or regulation but by a full-blown conspiracy (as the South Carolina Constitution's drafters put it in 1776) to 'reduce them from the rank of freemen to a state of the most abject slavery.'"