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 Alexander

Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi

How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi

Choke Hold by Paul Butler

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

This episode was put together by Chelsey Weber-Smith, Riley Smith, Rod Rodriguez, and Miranda Zickler.

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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 Collective

Reparations

Homeless Backpacks

GiveDirectly

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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-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Co-written by Riley Smith

Co-produced by Miranda Zickler

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

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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 Men

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Research and cowriting assisted by Riley Smith

Co-Produced by Miranda Zickler

Show art by Roache

Voice Acting by Will Rogers

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

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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-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Co-written by Riley Smith

Co-produced by Miranda Zickler

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

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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 here

American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Research and cowriting assisted by Riley Smith

Co-Produced by Miranda Zickler

Show art by Roache

Voice Acting by Will Rogers

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

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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-Smith

Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios

Co-written by Riley Smith

Co-produced by Miranda Zickler

Become a Patron for extra episodes, interviews, and videos monthly!

Follow American Hysteria on social media:

Twitter: @AmerHysteria

Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast

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