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A lust for alcoholic beverages and a taste for illicit drugs. Liberated women in search of sexual pleasure and the menace of racial integration. A nation undermined by crypto-communists and children led astray by rock and roll (not to mention sex and drugs). Stories of threats to our families and our homes seem to spread like proverbial wildfires. As scholars Angela McRobbie and Sarah L. Thornton noted more than two decades ago, this breathless state depends on, or even springs from, media engagement with these alleged dangers. Moral panics “guarantee the kind of emotional involvement that keeps up the interest of, not just tabloid, but broadsheet newspaper readers, as well as the ratings of news and true crime television, [and] even the media themselves are willing to take some of the blame.” Once an unintentional outcome of broadcasting the daily news, moral panics now seem to be the point of the news cycle. If McRobbie and Thornton’s assessment is accurate, how can we as media consumers sort the danger from the drama?

JSTOR Teaching ResourcesJSTOR Teaching Resources

The stories below focus on a variety of moral panics, adding historical context and scholarly analysis into the mix. These previously published stories show how moral panics begin and spread, analyzing motivations, mechanisms, and outcomes. The scholarship featured here highlights lessons from the past to help us detect patterns and language in the present. As always, the stories and the underlying scholarship are free to everyone.

Inventing the Moral Panic

Hogarth crime

The First Moral Panic: London, 1744

The late summer crime wave of 1744 London sparked an intense moral panic about crime that burnt itself out by the new year. But not before heads rolled.
Samuel Richardson

Why the First Novel Created Such a Stir

Samuel Richardson's Pamela, the first novel in English, astounded and terrified readers. Authors have striven for the same effect since.
Police officers gather as the body of NYPD officer Wilbert Mora is transferred in an ambulance from NYU Langone Hospital to a Medical Examiner's office at the same location on January 25, 2022 in New York City.

Crime Waves and Moral Panics

From train robberies to organized retail theft to murder, are we really gripped by a crime wave?
Slender Man

The Horror!

If Dracula represented the collective fears of his day, what do the likes of Slender Man and other internet monsters tell us about the zeitgeist of right now?
Mae West Belle of the Nineties

The End of American Film Censorship

The Hays Code kept Hollywood on a short leash until the Supreme Court decided in 1952 that films were protected by the First Amendment.
satanism

Satanism and Magic in the Age of the Moulin Rouge

How did some of the most illustrious names of fin de siècle French literature end up in a newspaper battle over witchcraft and evil spirits?
Photograph: A choir at the  Billy Graham evangelist crusade at London's Earls Court sing to 20,000 crowd under the  slogan ' I am the way'.  

Source: Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images

The Conservative Christian War on Rock and Roll

Tracing an early front in the culture wars to a trio of evangelical opponents of rock music in the 1950s and '60s.
Marshall "Major" Taylor

The Moral Threat of Bicycles in the 1890s

The bicycle craze of the 19th century, in which both men and women participated, was seen as a moral affront by church leaders. 
An illustration showing fencing positions, 1610

The Fencing Moral Panic of Elizabethan London

In Elizabethan England, it seemed like everyone was carrying a sharpened object with the intent to inflict damage.

Women, Sexuality, and Stigma

Members of the women's police service during World War I.

Was “Khaki Fever” a Moral Panic over Women’s Sexuality?

At the start of World War I, young working-class women swooned for men in uniform, leading middle-class women to form patrols to police public morals.
Dance hall illustration

Jane Addams’s Crusade Against Victorian “Dancing Girls”

Jane Addams, a leading Victorian-era reformer, believed dance halls were “one of the great pitfalls of the city.”
Amelie Mauresmo

The Sexual Politics of Wimbledon

At Wimbledon, tennis is about more than tennis. The story of Amélie Mauresmo illustrates the complex sexual politics of women athelete’s bodies.
Anita Bryant is hit in the face with a pie during a press conference on October 14, 1977

Proposition 6 (The Briggs Initiative): Annotated

Proposition 6, better known as the Briggs Initiative, was the first attempt to restrict the rights of lesbian and gay Americans by popular referendum.
A yellow and purple button with "Fight AIDS, Not People with AIDS" in yellow and purple font.

Pro-Epidemic Stigmatization

Prejudice and moralism interferes with public health, aiding and abetting the spread of the HIV and monkeypox viruses.
Jeanne Cagney in Quicksand

How Film Noir Tried to Scare Women out of Working

In the period immediately following World War II, the femme fatale embodied a host of male anxieties about gender roles.
Two men of the French Foreign Legion, 1955

OK Recruiter: The Legion is Coming

Anxieties over the abduction of young men into the French Foreign Legion after WWII reflected West Germany’s concerns about the state of their nation.
Frank Kameny

The Lavender Scare

In 1950, the U.S. State Department fired 91 employees because they were homosexual or suspected of being homosexual.
Mothers' Crusade for Victory over Communism

The Red Scare and Women in Government

In 1952, a government administrator named Mary Dublin Keyserling was accused of being a communist. The attack on her was also an attack on feminism.
J. Edgar Hoover, 1932

The FBI and the Madams

J. Edgar Hoover saw the political effectiveness of cracking down on elite brothel madams—but not their clients—in New York City.

Racism and Xenophobia

Yusef Salaam

Unpacking the Racially-Charged Term “Superpredators”

In the ‘90s, racialized terms like “wilding” and “superpredators” conjured moral panic, which justified the Crime Bill and other similar propositions.
An illustration of a voodoo dance, 1883

Racism and the Fear of “Voodoo”

During Reconstruction, lurid tales of African-derived religious practices in Louisiana made news all over the country—especially when worshipers included white women.
The end of the "White Man's Rally" on November 1, 1898 in Wilmington, NC

How Racist Cartoons Helped Ignite a Massacre

In 1898, a North Carolina newspaper cartoonist weaponized white fears and tropes of Black predation to stoke a coup d'etat.
National Guardsmen called out to quell race riots in Chicago in 1919

The Mob Violence of the Red Summer

In 1919, a brutal outburst of mob violence was directed against African Americans across the United States. White, uniformed servicemen led the charge.

The Danger of Drugs and Drink

Woodstock, 1969

Woodstock: Sex, Drugs, and Zoning

It's the 50th anniversary of the famous Woodstock festival, which was fraught with controversy before it even happened.
Valium

Just Saying No To Valium

Ninety million bottles of Valium were dispensed yearly in the U.S. during the mellow Seventies. What happened?
An advertisement by the Partnership for a Drug Free America

The Story Behind “This is Your Brain on Drugs”

How did the campaign behind the Partnership for a Drug Free America’s iconic commercials develop, and why were its products so memorable?
Reefer Madness

Marijuana Panic Won’t Die, but Reefer Madness Will Live Forever

Originally produced as an exploitation film that drew on racial stereotypes, the ironic revival of Reefer Madness made it a cult classic for stoners.
Federal Theatre Project presents "The drunkard or the fallen saved" Originally produced by P.T. Barnum in his museum

Temperance Melodrama on the Nineteenth-Century Stage

Produced by the master entertainer P. T. Barnum, a melodrama about the dangers of alcohol was the first show to run for a hundred performances in New York City.

Policing Language

young women talking

The Totally “Destructive” (Yet Oddly Instructive) Speech Patterns of… Young Women?

Two years ago, this column sprang into life by enthusiastically wading into the absurdly long-running debate about some ...
Close-up of the dictionary entry to 'colour'

Yas Queen! It’s the Spelling Reform School for Wayward Words

Debates over English spelling reform have existed for centuries.
imessage punctuation

The Strange Life of Punctuation!

Punctuation is often a symbolically loaded. Is there anything else so heavily regulated, codified and coddled as the period, comma, or exclamation point?

Editor’s Note: This list has updated with new content.


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The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 46, No. 4 (December 1995), pp. 559–574
Wiley on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science