Hearing the Voices of Jonestown : Putting a Human Face on an American Tragedy Paperback / softback
by Mary McCormick Maaga
Part of the Religion and Politics series
Paperback / softback
- Information
Description
When over 900 followers of the Peoples Temple religious group committed suicide in 1978, they left a legacy of suspicion and fear.
Most accounts of this mass suicide describe the members as brainwashed dupes and overlook the Christian and socialist ideals that originally inspired Peoples Temple members.
Hearing the Voices of Jonestown restores the individual voices that have been erased so that we can better understand what was created - and destroyed - at Jonestown, and why. Piecing together information from interviews with former group members, archival research, and diaries and letters of those who died there, Maaga describes the women leaders as educated political activists who were passionately committed to achieving social justice through communal life.
The book analyzes the historical and sociological factors that, Maaga finds, contributed to the mass suicide, such as growing criticism from the larger community and the influx of an upper-class, educated leadership that eventually became more concerned with the symbolic effects of the organization than with the daily lives of its members.
Hearing the Voices of Jonestown puts human faces on the events at Jonestown, confronting theoretical religious questions, such as how worthy utopian ideals come to meet such tragic and misguided ends.
Information
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Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:216 pages
- Publisher:Syracuse University Press
- Publication Date:30/03/2020
- Category:
- ISBN:9780815611226
Other Formats
- EPUB from £17.96
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:216 pages
- Publisher:Syracuse University Press
- Publication Date:30/03/2020
- Category:
- ISBN:9780815611226