Overview

In August 9-10, 1969, ex-convict, musician, and charismatic leader Charles Manson ordered members of his countercultural “family” to kill some of Hollywood's wealthy, white, “beautiful people.” He also told them to leave clues that would implicate black radicals, in hopes of thereby triggering an apocalyptic race war. Rather than a race war, however, the violence only unleashed terror. Once “the family” had been named as suspects and then as the “love and terror cult”, the case placed the entire counterculture under suspicion and came to mean, in line with a famous sentence handed down by Joan Didion in The White Album, the end of the Sixties. Based upon newly released archival material of case transcripts, Love and Terror presents the Manson case as an exemplary site for historical scholarship. The book shows how the standard story of the Manson murders came to be told the way it was, excavating its fragmented sources and then tracing the way these were arranged—in the media and in court—into the official version of events. Based on years of empirical research, Love and Terror presents the Manson murders as a prism of American culture, and as an event best understood in the context of global avant-gardist movements and revolutionary violence.

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9781804298077

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Reviews

A clarifying reevaluation.Love and Terror is the culmination of Verhoeven's tireless dive into the archives, combing through ""200,000 pages"" of court transcripts and revisiting a multitude of media interviews with Manson himself.Manson obsessives will find much to chew on. * Publishers Weekly *

Author Information

Claudia Verhoeven is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. She was born and raised in the Netherlands, but, after her family emigrated, educated in the US. She received a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in History from UCLA. Her first book is The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism and she is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism. She has been a fellow at the Robert Schuman Center of Advanced Studies at the European University Institute and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, and was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin in 2023-24.

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